The Times Literary nonfiction Reserve of the Year

‘A whip-smart, challenging book. It stuffed me with hope’ Zadie Smith

From one of the brightest young chroniclers folks culture comes this dazzling assortment of essays on the web, the self, feminism and politics.

We are living in the period of the self, in an era of malleable truth and widespread personal and political delusion. In these nine interlinked about Technique Reflection: Reflections on Self-Delusion essays, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s brightest young talent, explores her own coming old in this warped and complicated landscape.

From your rise of the web to her own appearance on an early reality Television show; from her experiences of ecstasy – both spiritual and chemical – to her uneasy engagement with this culture’s endless drive towards ‘self-optimisation’; in the phenomenon of the effective American scammer to her generation’s obsession with extravagant wedding ceremonies, Jia Tolentino writes with design, humour and a fierce clarity on the subject of these strangest of times.

Following in the footsteps of American luminaries such as Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, yet using a tone of voice and vision all her have, Jia Tolentino creates using a rare present for elucidating nuance and difficulty, coupled with a disarming warmth. This debut collection of her essays announces her exactly the sort of voice we need to hear from right now – and for many years to come.