Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.

A breakout writer at The New Yorker examines the fractures at the center of contemporary culture and identity with verve, deftness, and intellectual ferocity, for readers who’ve wondered what Susan Sontag would have been like if she had brain damage from the Internet.  Jia Tolentino has become a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time. Now, in this dazzling and entirely original collection of nine essays, written with a rare combination of give and sharpness, wit and fearlessness, she delves into the forces that warp our vision, demonstrating a stylistic potency and critical dexterity found nowhere else. Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social Internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

A razor-sharp short story about anonymity, mutual deception, and the perils of overexposure—debut fiction by Jia Tolentino, the New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror. With the pandemic looming, a listless social media editor accepts a job working for her former college friend Seraphina. A popular Instagram influencer, the subject of obsessive message-board surveillance, and a newly minted Karen of the Day, Seraphina is living out 2020 in the luxury of her “ultimate self-quarantine.” As the year escalates into upheaval and chaos, both women try, in increasingly secretive and complicated ways, to maintain the upper hand. Jia Tolentino’s I Would Be Doing This Anyway is part of Currency, a compounding collection of stories about wealth, class, competition, and collapse. If time is money, deposit here with interest. Read or listen in a single sitting.