Taipei

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

"[A] modernist masterpiece. . . . True, his characters are young people living in Brooklyn. And he writes about the Internet. But we should stop calling Tao Lin the voice of his generation. Taipei, his new novel, has less to do with his generation than with the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil. . . . I cheerfully wrote "Proust" in the margin early on—because the hero, a young writer named Paul, takes such a meta attitude toward his own memories."—Benjamin Lytal, New York Observer

"Here we have a serious, first-rate novelist putting all his skills to work."—Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Lin casts a spell in Taipei. . . . [It is] his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter and Klonopin: it's terse, neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures. . . . it's about flickers of perception, flickers that the author catches as if they were fireflies."—Dwight Garner, New York Times

"Amazing. . . . the best writer about what it's like to be f*cked up on drugs that I've ever read."—John Horgan, author of The End of Science

"One thing I like about Tao's writing is how beside the point for me 'liking' it feels -- it's a frank depiction of the rhythm of a contemporary consciousness or lack of consciousness and so it has a power that bypasses those questions of taste entirely. Like it or not, it has the force of the real."—Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station

"[A] novel about disaffection that's oddly affecting. . . . for all its emotional reality, Taipei is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Lin is an existential writer, really, less interested in tracing the contours of his particular social group than in describing the very personal and sometimes unbearable tyranny of one's own mind. . . . the novel's climactic scene. . . . builds over a few pages to a revelation that, in its sheer unexpected beauty, recalls the powerfully moving ending of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress."—Slate

TAO LIN is the author of the novels Leave Society and Taipei, the memoir Trip, the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, and other books. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, NOON, and elsewhere. He was born in Virginia, has taught in Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, and is the founder and editor of Muumuu House.