“Read this if you’re a fan of Tao Lin’s lo-fi renderings of aimless city kids.” —Nylon, Best Books of the Summer

“Punchy and…poignant.” —Vice

“The Internet becomes a novel in You’re Not Much Use to Anyone…a memoirist novel… [where] well-curated, pointillist anecdotes make up the action.” —The Daily Dot

“You’re Not Much Use to Anyone blurs the line between life and fiction, depicting the obsessive world of the twenty-something with frightening clarity.” —Village Voice

“There’s a raw honesty and deceptive thoughtfulness here.” —BuzzFeed Books

“If you’ve ever been curious about how anonymous bloggers get unexpectedly Internet-famous, this book will tell you in great, hyper-aware detail…Plus, it reads like a ‘Who’s Who of NYC.’” —Refinery 29

“In You’re Not Much Use to Anyone, David Shapiro lays bare the whole of a conflict-ridden, uncertain and scary existence…he is like the little brother of Karl Ove Knausgaard, a fellow literary genius who, by telling the truth of his life, transcended it; by laying claim to the whole of his humanity, transcended it...fascinating.” —The Awl

“Underneath Shapiro’s seemingly affectless tone is a great deal of real—and urbane—wit as well as an incisive eye for the details that drive relationships. You’re Not Much Use to Anyone deliciously captures the plight of the early twentysomething liberal arts major set adrift in a world not especially congenial to his or her particular skill set. It’s a very fun and surprisingly poignant read.” —Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

“I read David Shapiro’s very funny and deeply moving first novel beginning to end without stopping, delighted and stimulated by its interesting range of endearing characters and the unpretentious, compassionate voice of the narrator, who I found irresistibly and singularly real: at once playful and vulnerable and charming and harsh, yearning and impulsive, mysterious and relatable. I highly recommend You’re Not Much Use to Anyone.” —Tao Lin, author of Taipei

“David Shapiro is the best critic of the made-up status-obsessed horror-show world his generation inherited. His dryly hilarious book would have been nonsensical twenty years ago. He’s the obsessive voice of a generation that can see every little crazy thing—except themselves—more clearly than ever.” —Choire Sicha, author of Very Recent History

“David Shapiro’s You’re Not Much Use to Anyone seems to me the first example we’ve seen of the successful transformation of blog into novel: where other such projects have lazily slapped the hash of old online content between hard covers, Shapiro has invented a way to use a set of formal tensions—between the raw and the cooked, the fast and the slow, the urgent and the considered – to say something provocative, new, and very funny about performance, ambition, jealousy, and fear. If Tao Lin had been born to Gary Shteyngart’s parents and spent his early twenties slaving for pageviews at NewYorker.com, he would have written something like this, the Bright Lights, Big City of the click-here-now generation.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction