In 2019 Tony Tulathimutte published The Feminist, a short story that went about as viral as any short story could, becoming the most read fiction piece in the literary magazine n+1’s 20-year history, and sending certain corners of Twitter into a frenzy. The eponymous protagonist describes himself on his online dating profile as “unshakably serious about consent”. He doesn’t understand why, despite his impeccable feminist credentials, he keeps getting friend-zoned while men much uglier and less evolved than him get laid. In middle age, he joins online forums such as Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds, where he rages that his chronic sexlessness represents “a mass abrogation of the social contract by legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets”. Finally validated, his resentment becomes murderous.

Like all of Tulathimutte’s recent fiction, the story is extremely dark, mordantly, laugh-out-loud funny, and somewhat morally and politically ambiguous. He received many private messages from readers seeking a “gold bullion guarantee” that their reading of the story was correct – are you supposed to sympathise with the feminist? But Tulathimutte doesn’t like to answer such questions. “I want to be able to complicate any sort of reading that would reduce my work to something banal or ideological,” he tells me.

He knew the story was provocative, that some might (uncharitably) read him as an apologist for incels and that his work would be used online “as a shuttlecock in a battle that has only tangentially to do with the writing itself,” he says. “But if you’re going to let that stop you from publishing something, you’re failing as a writer; you’re not standing by the integrity of your work.”

I meet Tulathimutte at his apartment in Brooklyn, which is decorated with sleek mid-century furniture and many framed pictures. He is short and muscular, dressed in black jeans and a red sweatshirt designed by his friend, the artist and illustrator Hellen Jo, and looks much younger than 41. It would be tempting to describe him, as he does one of his characters, as having “severe neoteny but the soul of a thousand-year-old tree”, except Tulathimutte makes several jokes about having barely hit his 20s in terms of social development.

On social media he is a master shitposter who makes gags about porn and masturbation and tweets such gems as “not all of you are multitudes tbh. some of u are just one guy”. In his fiction, his characters – millennials obsessed with porn and masturbation and sometimes artful shitposters – find the traditional markers of adulthood elude them. They are not only unlucky in love but often unhappy at work, and their living arrangements are precarious: they might be sofa-surfing or stuck in house shares with very woke flatmates or domineering partners. “If I had to name a contender for the great millennial theme it would be resentment,” he says of his generation, the first in American history to be economically worse off than their parents.

The Feminist forms the opening chapter of Tulathimutte’s latest book, Rejection, a collection of interlinked short stories featuring a cast of lonely, bitter and generally deviant social misfits who, as the New Yorker put it, share “a nuclear inability to simply hang”. Tulathimutte says he’s interested in the way rejection fuels neurotic self-examination. “What did they find so off-putting about me?” the reject asks of themselves. This “puts you under the gaze of someone who isn’t you but is also invented by you, in a weird way”, he says.

As a child, Tulathimutte didn’t have many friends and was “exceedingly sheltered”, partly because his interests – video games and reading and “collecting marbles or whatever” – kept him at home. His parents had emigrated from Thailand and settled in a small town in Massachusetts, where Tulathimutte encountered few other Asian-American families. “Growing up, I felt pretty much like if anyone was going to pay attention to me at all I would have to clown off in some way,” he says. It took a while – 30 years, he says, half-joking, I think – to understand how often he was simply humiliating himself. (“What bothers me …” one character muses in Rejection, “is how good it felt, confusing visibility for dignity, and attention for acceptance.”)

When Tulathimutte began writing fiction, as an undergraduate majoring in cognitive sciences at Stanford, he wrote well-received, empathetic “sob stories” about good, likable people who were almost always white. He says his early writing was mostly influenced by the upmarket literary fiction he was being assigned in classes: “Literature that was by and for the largest market in literary fiction at the time, which is white liberals”. “There’s usually nobody telling you that what you finally got published after being rejected many times is not what you’re meant to be writing. So it threw me off for a long time,” he says.

On graduating, in 2006, Tulathimutte took various jobs in the gaming industry, working on user experience. Under-occupied, he read Anna Karenina in the bathroom, taught himself to laptop DJ and generally “fucked around a lot”. “It was sort of a crazy culture. There was a lot of drinking in the office,” he recalls. He met regularly with a writing group he had formed with classmates at Stanford and friends of friends. The group still meets often, and includes many successful authors, among them Alice Sola Kim, Karan Mahajan, Jenny Zhang, Vauhini Vara, Esmé Wang and RO Kwon. “I credit this group with eventually becoming a writer because I don’t think I would have been able to hang in over the long haul without having the pretext of meeting every two weeks or so over years and years,” he says.

He started reading a lot of Philip Roth, and it unseated his idea that literature is something that “sensitive and empathetic people do to become more sensitive and empathetic”. With the encouragement of his writing group, his stories became edgier, colder and more satirical, and he started writing about Asian Americans in a way that challenged liberal orthodoxies. His characters find identity politics reductive and dehumanising, they bridle against the misuse and absurdities of established hierarchies of privilege, the “flopsweating jargon [white liberals] invoked to signal their literacy on the subject of your own existence,” as one puts it.

As the global financial crisis hit, Tulathimutte began applying to MFA programmes and in 2008, the same week he was made redundant, he was accepted to the prestigious University of Iowa’s writers’ workshop, having submitted the first chapters of what would become his first novel, Private Citizens.

Tulathimutte was “pretty miserable” at Iowa. It was high-pressured and isolating and with few distractions from writing he noticed that “people tend to spiral into whatever dependencies they came in with,” he says. In his case it was “drinking a lot” and “being neurotic about dating”. “I was probably the only one who didn’t date anyone while we there who wasn’t, like, married. And even then, there was a ton of adultery,” he tells me.

Private Citizens was savaged in workshops that became so personal the tutor had to intervene to, in effect, ask people to be nicer to him. The earlier drafts of the book were more grandiloquent than the final version, he says, and “it was the kind of smarty pants writing that is fun to take down a peg”. But the criticism that cut deepest, he says, was his classmates’ suggestion that Tulathimutte didn’t seem to realise how much he resembled the “stupid, flat little” characters he encouraged his readers to laugh at.

After 19 rejections, Private Citizens was published in 2016. He calls the book, which follows four struggling, self-destructive and self-loathing recent Stanford graduates, a “comic social novel”. It went on to win a Whiting award. Jonathan Franzen described it as “phenomenal” and one of the best books of the decade.

Tulathimutte used the proceeds from the book and the Whiting award to set up CRIT, a very oversubscribed writing school that he runs from his living room. He loves having “open free discussions about what makes a story better”; so much so that to watch movies with him is an awful experience, he says, unless you really enjoy listening to a plot being workshopped in real time. He believes, contrary to many MFA programmes, that good writing can be taught, and has uncompromising standards. A pet peeve, he says, is anaphora (repetitive clauses, think: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times … ”). “It’s a plague!” he says, with feeling. “And invariably it’s sort of held up as examples of powerful, eloquent writing style.” He tries to encourage his students to form their own writing groups to support one another long after class has ended.

Thanks to teaching, Tulathimutte says he’s able to predict literary trends 12 to 18 months in advance. He saw post-pandemic sex writing coming, and now he is noticing a shift from millennial resentment about affluence to “fantastical writing about extreme wealth”: “Gen Z has a real interest in what it’s like to be extremely, fuck-you wealthy,” he says.

Could he predict, then, that The Feminist would resonate as much as it did? It tackles similar themes to Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, a New Yorker story that went viral two years earlier, also a rejection plot of sorts, and one similarly attuned to millennial awkwardness around sex and dating. “Any time you set something up in a really contemporary context, and then you hit up someone’s anxieties about something, it tends to resonate, right? In this case, it’s the anxiety around self-presentation and love. And for my generation at least, these are pretty ubiquitous themes,” he says.

These anxieties are intensified by social media and reflect the challenge of navigating shifting mores around sex and dating, he argues. “We know that traditional views on gender equality and how they manifest in dating are fucked and we want to move away from those. But very often what fills the vacuum is just as rife with power imbalance and exploitation as the thing you’re leaving, The Feminist being a case in point,” he says. He underlines that he believes that feminism itself is an unqualified good. The problem, he says, is that people exploit and manipulate its ideas.

“No matter what ideology you turn to, no matter how utopian it is, it does not solve the problem of hypocrites, frauds and charlatans. And that is the topic of most of my satire. It’s not really the ideologies themselves,” he says. I begin to ask him more about his writing on identity politics, but he walks away.

“Carry on, I’m listening!” he says, rootling around in a kitchen cabinet. “I just picked this up, it’s … Thoughts,” he adds, returning to the table with a bottle of Thoughts bourbon. It is not yet 3pm. He pours us both a glass, and continues to drink steadily thereafter, something that does not appear to affect him.

Identity politics and its abuses are a recurrent theme in Tulathimutte’s work. “Narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group,” the feminist says. In another story, Bee, a nonbinary Thai American, infuriates her right-on housemates by refusing all identity labels, arguing that they don’t want to be reduced to these categories. “Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst a patriotism of trauma, a prosthesis of personality,” they argue.

I wonder what Tulathimutte makes of the suggestion that the Democrats’ focus on identity politics cost them the 2024 election. “That perception is the invention of grievance-driven propaganda from the right wing,” he says, sounding genuinely put out. “They didn’t do the identity politics thing at all. They just took a very baffling [approach of] let’s just get a bunch of celebrity endorsements, let’s call Kamala ‘brat’ … ” Tulathimutte doesn’t oppose identity politics outright, but “it’s the frauds that ruin it for everyone”, he says.

An advantage of writing fiction, Tulathimutte says, is that you get to work out different political attitudes without either endorsing or condemning them. But Tulathimutte also likes to play with his readers, inviting them to elide the protagonist and the author. He once told a journalist that Will in Private Citizens, an Asian American tech whiz who has watched most of the porn on the internet and keeps a spreadsheet of everyone who has rejected him, was basically him – except, unlike Will, he has no girlfriend. But now he says that isn’t true. He says he’s interested in how people’s reading of his work will be shaped by who they think the author is, which means his responses in interviews might influence these readings. In Rejection, Bee, the anti-identity-politics nonbinary Thai-American, is the architect of an elaborate online hoax and online sleuths start to theorise that Bee’s true identity may be none other than … Tony Tulathimutte.

The final story in Rejection is a fictional letter from a publisher, rejecting the book. One way to take the sting out of rejection is to pre-empt the criticism. The publishers are on to this: “this perverse apologizing only feels like you’re cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder”. Echoing the criticism Tulathimutte received from classmates in Iowa, the publishers accuse him of writing about himself “in a way that feels embarrassingly unintentional”.

The truth, of course, is that every revelation and every obfuscation is entirely intentional, wincingly self-aware, and this is one way the writer – a creature so vulnerable to rejection – can appear to bare his soul without really giving anything away at all.