Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-delusion

Jia Tolentino
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Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-delusion

Jia Tolentino
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Overview

320 PAGESENGLISH

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“It's easy to write about things as you wish they were—or as others tell you they must be. It's much harder to think for yourself, with the minimum of self-delusion. It's even harder to achieve at a moment like this, when our thoughts are subject to unprecedented manipulation, monetization, and surveillance. Yet Tolentino has managed to tell many inconvenient truths in Trick Mirror—and in enviable style. This is a whip-smart, challenging book that will prompt many of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror. It filled me with hope.”—Zadie Smith

“Dazzlingly wide-reaching essays.”—Vanity Fair 

“The millennial Susan Sontag, a brilliant voice in cultural criticism. . . She remains engaged with her subjects even as she scratches her head and wonders why we do what we do. Even better: She writes like a dream.”The Washington Post

“I worship at the altar of Jia Tolentino, who is undoubtedly the sharpest and most incisive cultural critic alive. Jia is a for-real genius, so damn funny it's absurd, and her ability to cut through all the noise to reveal the heart of the matter is unmatched. What a gift to the universe that, in Trick Mirror, one of the subjects is herself.  This book is a master class in how to think about the world in 2019.”—Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life

“In Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino’s thinking surges with a fierce, electric lyricism. Her mind is animated by rigor and compassion at once. She’s horrified by the world and also in love with it. Her truths are knotty but her voice is crystalline enough to handle them. She’s always got skin in the game; she knows we all do. Her intelligence is unrelenting and full-blooded, a heart beating inside every critique. She refuses easy morals, false binaries, and redemptive epiphanies, but all that refusal is in the service of something tender, humane, and often achingly beautiful—an exploration of what we long for, how we long for it, and all the stories we tell ourselves along the way.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering

“It isn’t hyperbolic to say that New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino could be the Joan Didion of our time—writing about feminism, vaping, popular music, religion, and sexual assault with equal amounts of ease and insight. In her debut essay collection, the writer unveils nine new pieces that help cement her place in the essayist canon. She’s an expert in the sweet spot where contemporary politics and youth culture meet and make out.”—Vulture

“From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television. Tolentino is among our age’s finest essayists, dissecting the foibles that animate our modern lives with wit, intellectual rigor, and empathy.”—Esquire

“Modern American life, especially as lived online, increasingly takes on qualities of insanity, even nightmare, and Trick Mirror has something profound to say about how that happened.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“It has been a consolation these last few years to know that no matter what was happening, Jia Tolentino would be writing about it, with a clear eye and a steady hand, a quick wit and a conscience, and in some of the best prose of her generation.”—Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy

Overall rating: 4.6666665 / 5 from 3 reviews.

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Review topics: ["writing","idea"].

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Reviews

Interesting ideas, not so greatly articulated

"Unnecessarily complicated and stilted language when articulating her ideas in most of the essays."

Jorge E. (4/5)

Wow.

"This book is SO GOOD, I can’t stop thinking about it!!!! Jia Tolentino is so cool, and I just wanna be her friend! (Pls!). She’s written a book that’s smart, interesting, witty, and sharp. She manages to balance laugh out loud humour with serious cultural analysis, and breathtaking writing. Tolentino’s words are magic, and I keep finding myself learning and growing, and thinking of things with new perspectives. This is what books are supposed to do, and this book is absolutely MAGICAL. ✨ Somehow each essay is just as fantastic as the others, I love losing myself in her words. Although, of course, I enjoyed some essays more than others - each one challenged me, and broadened my mind, and made me want to savour it. I would read Jia Tolentino’s grocery lists, and even her pocket texts because, DAMN, Tolentino can ~ W R I T E~. This is a MUST READ. For millennials, for women, for people who like to think, and for lovers of the written word. I can already tell we’re going to be talking about this book for years to come - and I, for one, will be shouting about it from the roof tops!!"

Ameema (5/5)

Come here to laugh, but stay for everything else.

"I bought this collection of essays off a friend's recommendation, and I can't believe I hadn't read it earlier. Jia Tolentino has a knack for carrying you along an argument she is making and throwing you for a loop halfway through, taking it to a new place that you didn't even consider, yet that becomes critical to actually understanding the whole idea in a ""how did I not think of this before?"" sort of way. This is just good writing, with contemporary subject matter adding to it's strength instead of trivializing the experience of living in 2019. Come here to laugh at Instagram scams and crazy wedding traditions and side hustles and reality tv, but stay for everything else."

Gill (5/5)

Q&A

  • Published date: Jul 14, 2020
  • Language: English
  • No. of Pages: 320
  • Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  • ISBN: 9780525510567
  • Dimensions: 5.17" W x 0.64" L x 7.98" H
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

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