Reboot

Praise

“[Taylor’s] book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America with complete with its own highly imagined myths . . . . It’s a performance of wit and rigor freed of the familiar polarizing semantics, making legible . . . just how much conspiracy theory and pop culture have fused. Not just QAnon and Russiagate, but Kate Middleton and Birds Aren’t Real.”
—New York Times Book Review

“Taylor also demonstrates the broader public costs of living inside narratives, especially the most polluted ones — antisemitism, QAnon, lizard people. . . . Though ‘funnier than Don DeLillo’ may seem like faint praise, Reboot wrings brilliant laughs from the absurdity of David’s predicament, and the way Hollywood and internet language can seem like foreign tongues, something human-adjacent but not quite human . . . . What are we missing while we marinate in this nonsense? That’s Taylor’s sharpest joke.”
—Washington Post


“Justin Taylor has a knack for depicting our modern moment with a wisdom that often only comes from hindsight….David’s situation asks big questions about who we are as a culture, what we value, and the things that bring us together and tear us apart. You know, like teen soaps.” —Town and Country Magazine

“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 Reviews (starred review)

“Justin Taylor’s apocalyptic Reboot pulls off a feat few novels of our online present manage: reading it actually feels like tapping into the internet’s best celeb gossip, fiercest fandom outrages, and wildest conspiratorial rabbit holes.” —Publishers Weekly

“An introspective literary look at contemporary entertainment, families, culture, and the never-ending search for connection.” —Booklist

“Reboot is a hilarious and thoughtful romp through our culture of endless rebooting—with detours into toxic online fandom, climate change, conspiracy theories, and more…”
—Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout

“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, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

“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.” —Isaac Butler, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Method

“A laugh-out-loud, bingeable romp, 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

“Justin Taylor is cursed with equal portions of modesty and genius. What inevitably results is a multilayered masterpiece about a paradox.” —Nell Zink, author of Avalon

“Reboot is the perfect 21st century novel—ecstatically funny and heartbreaking.” —Daniel Hornsby, author of Sucker and Via Negativa