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About Taipei
Product Description 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 Amazon.com Review Guest Review of Taipei, by Tao LinBy Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His work has been published in The New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals. Yu lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children. What does it feel like to be alive? It's an inquiry central to many novels, either explicitly or implicitly, and it has been explored in so many ways, in so many variations and permutations, that it's remarkable when someone finds a new way of asking the question. With Taipei, Tao Lin has managed to do just that. The novel's protagonist, Paul, is a twenty-something writer living in New York City who has at least two extraordinary capabilities: (1) a terrifyingly high tolerance for pharmacological substances, and (2) a prodigious ability to record and recount the moment-to-moment flow of micro-impressions and fleeting sensations of his awareness. While Lin may not be the first writer to combine these two elements in the form of a novel, he is the first one to synthesize them in this particular way, and it is the tension and interaction of these things that make Taipei such a compelling read. What does it feel like to be alive? Weird. Really weird. That's something very easy to forget - we have an ability to acclimate quickly to our own ambient mental environment. For similar reasons, the fundamental strangeness of being alive is also very hard to articulate. What Tao Lin does is to slow everything down, paying very close attention to everythi
