From Publishers Weekly
Poet and blogger Lin's debut novel uneasily documents the life of Andrew, a recent college graduate working at Domino's Pizza while over-analyzing every aspect of his life: past, present and futureless. He drives through the suburbs reminiscing about college life in New York and his ex-girlfriend, stopping occasionally to express his boredom to his best friend Steve. When at one point, Andrew states that he wants to "wreak complex and profound havoc" upon capitalist establishments such as McDonald's, it feels like Lin is attempting the same kind of attack on organized art. The novel, while short on plot, makes abrupt shifts in setting and point of view, and is pierced throughout by celebrity cameos and surreal touches: bears, dolphins (who say "Eeeee Eee Eeee" to express emotion, in spite of their ability to speak like humans), Salman Rushdie, and the president make grandiose declarations that are heavily saturated with the same sardonic wit displayed by Andrew and his friends. The novel dips dangerously into metafiction, with Andrew in the middle of "writing a book of stories about people who are doomed." The characters' repetitive thoughts and conversations become strangely hypnotic, however, and Lin's sympathetic fascination with the meaning of life is full of profound and often hilarious insights.
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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
Tao Lin’s book blog, reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com, has made him one of the most talked-about young writers on the scene today. His commentaries taking mainstream writers to task and calling for the death of commercial writing have generated nonstop discussion and made him the subject of innumerable profiles on leading cultural websites, from McSweeney’s to Bookslut to Gawker and on. Meanwhile, his fiction appears regularly in the ’zines and websites defining the new culture.
Lin meets and surpasses all expectations in a debut novel set in the bizarre alternative reality of today’s youth culture. EEEEE EEE EEEE is a pleasingly sophisticated work, an unself-conscious yet commanding tour de force about the search for meaning in a culture gone mad with celebrities and advertising.
Depicting a group of friends transitioning between school and adulthood, Lin’s prose is strikingly stylish, funny, and lyrical, as he reminds us that youth is still—refreshingly—a time of deep questioning, poignant realization, fun, and hope. It is a place where animals talk, books and music matter, honesty counts, and you can ask, without fear of embarrassment, “What’s a Jhumpa Lahiri?”
It is a sparkling, joyous debut.
Tao Lin, also author of the story collection Bed, 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.
