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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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FUCCBOI

Sean Thor Conroe

A jaw-droppingly original examination of masculinity under late capitalism from an electrifying new voice, for readers of Sheila Heti, Nico Walker, and Junot Diaz.
Set in Philadelphia for the most part, FUCCBOI is a raucous, freewheeling and freestyling novel. We follow Sean, our eponymous fuccboi*, as he attempts to live meaningfully and "woke"-ly in an increasingly atomized world.

An aspiring writer, Sean works a variety of unforgiving and unsustainable gigs to survive. Rich UPenn students and other oblivious yuppies blithely send him to pick up chicken fingers in snowstorms via delivery apps, he sets up acres of furniture for tech conventions; he even dabbles in barn-building. When he's not just trying to make ends meet, he's cycling through his roster of baes**, whom he struggles both to genuinely connect with and to avoid objectifying. Throughout, Sean navigates the performative contours of modern social interaction with mixed results. Literature, podcasts, and rap alternately guide and mislead him. Somehow Conroe coaxes us to empathize with the unique struggles of downwardly mobile men like Sean, while slyly undercutting the hypocrisy and inadequacy of his cobbled-together creed.

*fuccboi (plural fuccbois) (slang, vulgar, derogatory) A young man of poor judgment or taste, especially one who is perceived as cowardly or trying too hard to be cool. Or to quote from Bustle: "Those dudes you dated in college or in your 20s that didn't have their shit together at all, but thought there was something endearing about that. They're the kind of guys who try valiantly to get you hammered because that's their most effective method of getting laid."
**bae: a shortened version of baby or babe

Sean Thor Conroe was born Kamura Sho in Tokyo in 1991 and raised in Scotland, Upstate New York, and California; his writing has appeared in New York Tyrant, Hobart, The Nervous Breakdown, and Volume 1 Brooklyn. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. He has guest edited New York Tyrant Magazine and is the host of the book podcast 1storypod. He lives in Harlem. FUCCBOI is his first novel.
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Published 2022-01-25 by Little Brown

Comments

"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."

"The Odyssey, the Bible, Dante's Inferno, Hamlet, Ulysses, Infinite Jest.Fuccboi."

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. Masculinity also drifts through the streets of Liam Konemann's coming-of-age debut, The Arena of the Unwell, a sweaty, sticky mosh pit of a novel. Set in north London's music venues, pubs and NHS therapy rooms, 22-year-old Noah is torn between relationships with two older men while trying to escape his own oppressive mind. Read more...

Excerpt and author profile Read more...

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.

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.

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?

"Sean Conroe isn't one of the writers there's a hundred of. We won't tell somebody 'Sean Conroe' when we meant to say the name of another writer we got confused with Sean Conroe. He writes what's his own, his own way."

"Blazes a sonic trail through the tangles of experience. A contemporary künstleromana coming of age of an artist, and also so much about the struggle to find a communally beneficial but still honest and not self-suppressing way to be a man."

"A completely unique voice. Sounds like no one I know."

Sean Thor Conroe: 'It was a hard book to share' - The 30-year-old novelist discusses his electrifying debut, which offers a deft and cuttingly-funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism. "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." Read more...

"Fuccboi' is Its Generation's Coming-of-Age Novel" Read more...

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.

Author Sean Thor Conroe discusses masculinity under capitalism and why he's not a 'Fuccboi' anymore... Read more...

The Brooklyn-based author's explosive debut novel explores modern and often toxic masculinity through a radical viewpoint. Here's how one of literature's most exciting new voices spends his time off the page. Read more...

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.

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... 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.

Got under my skin in the way the best writing can.

Fresh prose, colloquial and poetic.

Thrilling in its urgent audacity.

"Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it."

UK: Headline Wildfire

A startling, scabrous, big swaggy flex of a debut... a magnetic voice.