From Publishers Weekly
This set of nine pseudo-autobiographical, woe-is-our-generation absurdist tales updates Oblamov for worried 21st century slackerdom. Lin's characters will be familiar to MySpace denizens, whether they're struggling through college in a busy city, stifling in an exhausted relationship just for the body heat, or missing their parents (but not knowing how to tell them without sounding as if asking for money). Settings are cheekily vague: "Love Is A Thing On Sale For More Money Than Exists," about a much-needed break-up, takes place during "the month that people began to suspect terrorists had infiltrated Middle America," while "Nine, Ten," a love story about two nine-year-olds and their divorced parents, occurs during the year that people "got a bit careless." As precocious children, depressing descriptions of urban pollution and beached marine life pile up, it becomes clear that Lin's subject is the inadequacy of conventional tools and wisdom for coping with the era of the War on Terror: "Was the future now? Or was it coming up still?... all that was promised... was not here, and would probably never be here. They had lied. Someone had lied." Such observations make the flat, matter-of-fact prose and aimless pop culture references come into vivid focus.
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Review
“Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.”
—Miranda July, author of
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Book Description
"Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass — from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious."—Miranda July
A startlingly original voice announces itself immediately in this collection of award-winning stories. Tao Lin’s absorbing writing style matches a minimalist prose with a lyric sensibility, poignant compassion with a hysterical sense of humor, bitter reality with enchanting fantasy, and youthful outlandishness with a gentle, mature perceptiveness—all in shaped stories that are a tribute to the form.
In a series of pinpoint portrayals, Lin’s tales depict young people in a surreal place between irresponsible youth and workaday adulthood, wanting to reject both cultures in order to craft something different. But such rebellion is harder than ever in a culture dominated by outrageousness, and Lin sensitively portrays the struggle in a way that is highly entertaining, impressively smart, and ultimately moving.
It will leave some cheering the war against a dumbed-down culture, others laughing at the tactics, and all concerned feeling like they’ve got a new champion in Tao Lin.
Tao Lin, also author of the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, lives in New York City.
About the Author
Tao Lin was last year's winner of NYU's Undergraduate Creative Writing Prize. He is the poetry editor for 3 a.m. magazine, and proprietor of the book blog ReaderofDepressingBooks.com. His stories and poems have appeared in Mississippi Review, Cincinnati Review, Other Voices, Punk Planet, and many other magazines. Tao was born in 1983.
