Fuccboi

“Terse and intense and new…I loved it.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There

“Fuccboi is its generation’s coming of age novel…Utterly of its moment, of this moment.”—Jay McInereny, Wall Street Journal

A fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism from an electrifying new voice.

Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves—cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer—he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery—being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes—that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?

Written in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.

“Got under my skin in the way the best writing can.” —Sheila Heti

• “Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it.”
   
  TOMMY ORANGE, author of THERE THERE
• “Got under my skin in the way the best writing can.”
  SHEILA HETI
• “Blazes a sonic trail through the tangles of experience. A contemporary künstleroman—a coming of age of an artist. So much about the struggle to find a nourishing and communally beneficial but still honest and not self-suppressing way to be a man.”
  SAM LIPSYTE, author of HARK
• “The Odyssey, the Bible, Dante’s Inferno, Hamlet, Ulysses, Infinite Jest…Fuccboi.”
   
  GIANCARLO DITRAPANO
• “A startling, scabrous, big swaggy flex of a debut…a magnetic voice.”
  Hermione Hoby, BOOKFORUM
• “Fuccboi is its generation’s coming of age novel…Conroe’s prose seduces, and like all good writing, demands a degree of intimacy between narrator and reader… He has a distinctive, compelling voice that strikes me as utterly of its moment, of this moment... As bookish as this novel is, it seems like a genuine attempt to speak to some of those who don’t normally give a shit about books, or at least, those who don’t read The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books—while also being worth the attention of those who do.”
   
  Jay McInerny, WALL STREET JOURNAL
• “A completely unique voice . . . sounds like no one I know.”
  SCOTT MCCLANAHAN, author of THE SARAH BOOK
• “Sean Thor Conroe's blistering debut, Fuccboi, asks 2022's quintessential question: just how much fuckery is too much fuckery? Following the titular, freewheeling fuccboi around Philly, one year into Trump's presidency, the novel examines modern manhood, the gig economy and the hypocrisy of political promises.”
  VICE
• “A mélange of cheap beer and philosophical musing, of millennial daftness and struggle, loneliness and imagination…Conroe’s words trek down the page with frenetic speed—a linguistic hustle, of sorts…jazzed, clipped, energetic—I loved it.”
  Miah Jeffra, THE RUMPUS
• "fresh prose, colloquial and poetic."
  Keziah Weir, VANITY FAIR
• “Praised by ballsy writers like Tommy Orange and Nico Walker, Fuccboi is a debut coming-of-age (but probably not in the traditional sense!) novel about hypocrisy and self-awareness.”
  NYLON, January’s Must Reads
• “Thrilling in its urgent audacity.”
  Israel Daramola, VULTURE, Most Anticipated Books of 2022
• “Conroe’s writing percolates with savage humor and wry observations on human complexity…Conroe works with a really rare audacity and slyness to ask – how much fuckery is too much fuckery?”
   
  ANOTHER MAGAZINE, Most Anticipated Books of 2022
• “Conroe delivers a striking and hyper-stylized debut about a young male writer, also named Sean Thor Conroe, whose lexicon reflects Drake lyrics and the scrolls of Reddit and Twitter. . . Along the way, Sean demonstrates a passion for Nietzsche, Bolaño, and Wittgenstein. . . An undeniably rich mix of ingredients for autofiction.”
  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
• "Electrifying debut. . . which approaches modern manhood with a deft, self-aware touch. Written in an engrossing, choppy cadence that sews together Philly slang and Twitterspeak, Fuccboi is an entirely singular, caustic book. . . . A rare, bracingly complicated narrator. There’s an impish vein of humour that courses through Fuccboi, with Conroe evidently in full control of a tricky narrative.”
  Patrick Sproull, HUCK
• “A book to argue and laugh with; be appalled and impressed by. Fuccboi wrestles with big questions about masculinity and modernity, but best of all are its intimate and domestic moments: like Knausgaård, Conroe has a knack for making the mundane enthralling.”
  CHRIS POWER, author of MOTHERS and A LONELY MAN
• “Modern mores and a certain type of twentysomething male energy clash colorfully in the vibrant voice of this debut novel… Conroe’s punchy variant includes rap slang and internet speak, bc that’s how it is now, bruh. He also fucks with those one-line paras. Quick blunt insights, stacked up n shit…Fuccboi’s main claim to newness lies in the narrator’s middle-way attitude to the ball-aching social justice religion that clogs the air of American cultural life…The internalized contradictions of his dementing culture manifest in amusing ways…I enjoyed being led through the vagaries of Sean’s ‘sus hetero bro’ existence.”
  Rob Doyle, THE GUARDIAN
• “What Conroe does so excellently is enrapture us within the psyche of this unpleasant figure, entangle us with Sean’s brain worms and force us, reluctantly, to look again…Dare I be so despotic as to proclaim Fuccboi a necessary novel? You bet I do! How brilliant to finally have a novel that examines contemporary masculinity with such candor, with such humor and style as to immediately read like a modern classic. Sean Thor Conroe is a real one.” 
  Barry Pierce, THE IRISH TIMES
• "We are all a product of our time, and for Conroe’s protagonist, his crisis of masculinity is also modern America’s crisis of masculinity. If men are still choking on the toxicity of historical conventions of gender, then literature should be a welcoming space for exploring, questioning and airing the “savage, ugly, testosterone-fuelled, shameful” things that we would all rather repress – regardless of gender."
  Katie Goh, THE SKINNY
• "Fuccboi has crawled up people’s backsides in a way only the best fiction does, especially when it holds a mirror up to the cultural zeitgeist – and the reflection isn’t always so pretty."
  Jade Wickes, THE FACE
• "Written with a caustic sense of humour... Conroe peels back the Carhartt and confronts the anxieties at the Fuccboi’s core, with verve, humour and empathy. It’s essentially a bildungsroman for a generation of disaffected men."
  Nessa Humayun, HUNGER
• “One of the successes of Sean Thor Conroe’s exploration of contemporary masculinity in Fuccboi is making dishonesty function at the level of style rather than content…Uninterested in any moralizing framework, Fuccboi turns its attention instead to the inner life of a perceived ‘bad guy.’ What we find there is not a sociopathic manipulator but instead someone so overwhelmed by their own psychic life that clear communication is just hard… Conroe invites us to have sympathy for a narrator who has gone out of his way to make us revile him. This portrayal forces on us the question: If we find Sean morally repugnant, what kind of life would he need to have to improve?”
   
  Ed Luker, JACOBIN
• “The novel is about something more interesting than sex. It’s an account of a highly specific crack-up, and a largely self-inflicted one, though a few of the usual suspects, among them capitalism and the American healthcare system, share some of the blame…Another title for Fuccboi might have been Burakumin, the term for the outcast children of Japanese hamlets… It’s to this tradition that Fuccboi belongs and in which it succeeds.”
  Christian Lorentzen, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
• “Written like the best, most frenetic conversation you’ve ever had with your BFF, this debut exposes the raw nerves of Millennial masculinity.”
   
  BOOKLIST, The Best Millennial Novels (So Far)