Taipei
Tao Lin
At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle - with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realisation that his day 'was over' - he noticed with confusion, having thought it was early morning, that it was 4:46PM
Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.
From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.
Product Details
About Tao Lin
Reviews for Taipei
Bret Easton Ellis Lin's writing is reminiscent of early Douglas Coupland, or early Bret Easton Ellis, but there is also something going on here that is more profoundly peculiar, even Beckettian . . . deliciously odd
Guardian
Moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious
Miranda July, author of No One Belongs Here More Than You Lin is a 21st century literary adventurer . . . [Taipei] is a fascinating book, bone dry, repellant, painful, but relentlessly true to life
Frederick Barthelme, author of Waveland A Kafka for the iPhone generation . . . Tao Lin may well be the most important writer under thirty working today
Clancy Martin [A] deadpan literary trickster
New York Times
Alienation, obsession, social confusion, drugs, the internet, sex, food, death - [are] rendered here with a calm intuition . . . a work of vision so relentless it forces most any reader to respond
Blake Butler, author of Sky Saw A strange, hypnotic, memoir-reeking novel that is equal parts dissociative and heartbreaking, surreally hallucinogenic and grittily realist, ugly and beautiful
Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects Deeply smart, funny, and heads-over-heels dedicated
New York Magazine
Lin captures certain qualities of contemporary life better than many writers in part because he dispenses with so much that is expected of current fiction
London Review of Books