My name is Giles Harvey. I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine and I often cover literature and the literary world.

A couple of years ago I read a short story by the Thai American writer Tony Dula Tomooti, called the feminist.

The story is about a young guy who prides himself on being an upstanding feminist ally,

and the central problem in his life is that women keep rejecting him, and he can't understand why.

And after a while he begins to spend a lot of time

on misogynistic online message boards where he's radicalized and

transformed into a violent anti-feminist ideologue.

The story is a bit like the 40-year-old Virgin, the Janapertau movie,

but as reimagined by Philip Roth at his most outrageous and incandescent,

which is to say it's both deeply disturbing and very, very funny.

And I was just electrified by it.

Tony was writing about contemporary identity politics with a candor and an intelligence that I hadn't really seen

from other serious fiction writers of his generation.

I know it's a vague and somewhat overused term, but when I say identity politics I'm talking about an approach to politics and just how we understand ourselves as people in the world

that foregrounds categories like race or gender or sexual orientation and as you're probably aware it's created a ferocious

backlash from conservatives as well as plenty of controversy within liberal communities.

And it was clear from reading the feminist that Tony wasn't afraid to steer directly into these debates and to use them as his fictional material.

What I thought was incredible about the feminist is that even though Tony clearly finds his

protagonist's misogynistic views hateful he still writes about the guy with

tremendous compassion.

And he allows us to feel the pain and the isolation that led the protagonist to embrace those ideas in the first place.

And I think that kind of moral and imaginative sympathy is

...