A New York Times Notable Book of 2024
A Washington Post Best Fiction of 2024 selection
A Bookshop.org Best Book of 2024
“Justin Taylor’s maximalist new novel “Reboot” [is] an exuberant satire of modern society that stuffs everything from fandom to TV retreads to the rise of conspiracy culture into its craw.”
— Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Justin Taylor’s second novel, “Reboot,” is a very serious story about the perniciousness of conspiracy thinking, wrapped in a very funny yarn about the shallowness of celebrity culture.”
— Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
“A novelist chases reality. If our current one eludes easy capture, points are rewarded for remaining competitive with an alternate. Taylor earns lots of points. His book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America complete with its own highly imagined myths, yet one still rooted in the Second Great Awakening and the country’s earliest literature. It’s a performance full of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible something the actual streaming-posting-retweeting world, with its relentless pace and all-too-real stakes, can easily obscure, which is just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused. Not just QAnon and Russiagate, but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real.”
— Joshua Ferris, New York Times Book Review
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PRAISE FOR REBOOT
“Taylor’s fluency, intellectual nimbleness, and playful sense of humor call to mind the work of David Foster Wallace; the reader can easily imagine David Crader’s video game adaptation of Infinite Jest. An affecting character study and excoriating indictment of the way we live now.”
—Kirkus, Starred Review
“[T]hematically among many of the other great contemporary Southeastern American writers, like Brenda Peynado and Lauren Groff—writers who’ll wield the environment as a character who’s begging for you to look at it, but are clever in how they allow it to emerge. This book, of course, also goes out to all the ’90s kids who stayed up reading Roth and DeLillo and Denis Johnson after The X-Files ended at 10:00. Taylor’s language in this one, it’s worth noting, is faster and poppier than the ’90s postmodernists to which he nods. It’s a shift for Taylor, who’s lived in the lit-fic space for the bulk of his career (two story collections, a novel, and a beautiful memoir—2020’s Riding with the Ghost), and it raises some genuinely interesting questions about where the language of literary fiction can tease into other realms. There are moments in Reboot that dip into the language you’d expect to read in teen drama, thriller, and (fictional) memoir. There are bottle episodes. It’s a voice that works, even if the character who’s speaking keeps making wrong—but new!—decisions.”
—Dez Deshaies, Chicago Review of Books
“A perfect 10/10. The novel DeLillo would have written if he was an elder millennial who’d seen every episode of Buffy and Dawson’s Creek.”
—Adam Wilson, author of Sensation Machines
“An introspective literary look at contemporary entertainment, families, culture, and the never-ending search for connection.”
— Kristine Huntley, Booklist
“April 23”
— New York Times, “27 Works of Fiction Coming This Spring” (& “17 New Books Coming in April”)
“A failed actor’s search for yet another second chance becomes a hilarious portrait of how our culture’s insistence on making everything a reference to something else has destabilized reality and our ability to make meaning. It’s the best—maybe only good?—internet novel since Chronic City. What Justin Taylor’s done is dramatize how we cling to the past as the future becomes less tenable but this in turn creates a totally unstable present. But he’s done it with humor, and beautiful prose, and Jewish mysticism, and memes, and a roguelike about how the Earth is hollow.”
— Isaac Butler, author of The Method
“For all the talk of an Other America — that underground country whose president is Trump and whose capital is Florida — we have precious few novels of its condition, and none as powerful, passionate, whacked-out, and pathic as Justin Taylor’s REBOOT.”
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
“A laugh-out-loud, bingeable romp of child star comebacks and climate terror, news not quite fit to print, and the gig economy blues, Justin Taylor’s REBOOT brilliantly reckons with an America soliciting likes off shitposts while it drowns. It also happens to be that rare, bang-up novel as big-hearted as it is ambitious, written by a writer at the height of his wild gifts.”
— Tracy O’Neill, author of Quotients
“REBOOT is the perfect 21st century novel. Its all-you-can-eat buffet of delights includes a subterranean video-game cult, fanfic exegesis, washed-up former teen stars, and even a few tentacle creatures. Taylor has found the music and flow of Bellow’s best work, and the result is ecstatically funny and heartbreaking.”
— Daniel Hornsby, author of Sucker
“REBOOT is the new American novel. Farcical up close, tragic at a distance: a bouncy house in a hurricane. There’s madness, brilliance, and real heart in these pages, which I’d call ‘funny DeLillo’–except everything is DeLillo now, and the laughs are really tears of recognition. Maybe joy.”
— Ryan Chapman, author of The Audacity
“Justin Taylor is cursed with equal portions of modesty and genius, so when he sets out to write a page-turner that might interest consumers of streaming TV, what results is inevitably a multilayered masterpiece about a paradox: in this case, succession as cancellation. The old must die for the new to be born—that’s the usual dark cliche; but in a culture of novelty, to what extent is the old even alive? It is strongly advised to pay the new to write its lines—all of them, even its memories. For the inheritors, liberation can be speeded by murder or, failing that, a shift in genre. The events of yesterday are ripe for effacement by nostalgia, and the only usable (or is it “visible”?) news comes from the future as speculative, very-online ecriture feminine. I know I’m getting a bit bewildering here, but Justin is one of the great chroniclers of contemporary culture, and this is a valuable and important book, even though it’s not actually TV.”
— Nell Zink, author of Avalon
“A funny, excellent satire of our current desire to reboot literally everything – unfortunately with an ending that just didn’t cut it for me. Excellent writing though.”
— Rosalind, two-star review on Goodreads