Tao Lin

A dark lament reflecting the macabre aspects of today's world follows the experiences of a man who navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes before touring Taipei, where he confronts family origins, suffers a breakup and pursues an internet affair that culminates in a gaudy Vegas wedding. Original.

Taipei

A bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives--as an artist, a son, and a loner. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL. In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds--year by year, over four years--he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether? In his most recent work, Tao Lin delivers an engrossing and hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together that builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance. Exploring everyday events and scenes--waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals--while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin spins the ordinary into something monumental, and shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history.

Leave Society

Shoplifting from American apparel

psychedelics, alienation, and change

Trip

Part memoir, part history, part journalistic exposé, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists--The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation. A Vintage Original. While reeling from one of the most creative--but at times self-destructive--outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe? In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.

Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

In a startling change of direction, cult favourite Tao Lin presents a dark and brooding tale of illicit love that is his most sophisticated and mesmerising yet. Named after the real-life writer Richard Yates, but, having nothing to do with him, Lin tracks the illicit affair between a very young writer and his underage lover. As the writer seeks to balance work and love, his young lover becomes ever more self-destructive in a play for his undivided attention. Lin's trademark minimalism takes on a new sharp-edged suspense here, zeroing in on a lacerating narrative.

Richard Yates

An autobiographical novella reflects the creative influences and personal challenges of an existentially minded writer who struggles with his relationships, vices, and failures while interacting with famous authors in a variety of cultural arenas. Original.

Shoplifting from American Apparel

An off-kilter and funny novel in which confused yet intelligent animals attempt to interact with confused yet intelligent humans, resulting in the death of Elijah Wood, Salman Rushdie and Wong Kar Wai; a vegan dinner at a sushi restaurant is attended by a dolphin, a bear, a moose, an alien, three humans and the President of the USA, who lectures on the arbitrary nature of consciousness, truth and the universe before getting drunk and playing poker.

A Novel

Eeeee Eee Eeee

In Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy a 23-year-old person attempts to explain to himself the possible origins, ends, and cures of anger, worry, despair, obsession, and confusion, while concurrently experiencing those things in various contexts including a romantic relationship, a book of poetry, and the arbitrary nature of the universe.

Poetry

Cognitive-behavioral Therapy

Today the Sky is Blue and White With Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale Moon and I Will Destroy Our Relationship Today

An absurdist short story collection about the woes of 21st-century living—from an author whose writing is “moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious” (Miranda July) College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny’s, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which—much like the Loch Ness Monster—they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore “good enough.”

Stories

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2005 December Prize. Reading Tao Lin is like looking the wrong way down Frank O'Hara's ear trumpet at a 21st century Mayakovski IM-ing Lili Brik. This book is fun, smart, manic and ecstatic; it puts on a clean shirt before it loads the gun. "YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting"--Deb Olin Unferth. Tao Lin is 23 and lives in New York City. Visit his blog reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com.

You are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am

this emotion was a little e-book

Impúdicamente autobiográfica y desesperadamente moderna, sobria y austera como un hermoso haiku, deliciosamente absurda y dolorosamente divertida, "Robar en American Apparel" sembró controversia y encendida polémica desde el momento de su publicación. Las hilarantes y absurdas correrías de Sam, empleado basura, aspirante a escritor, adicto a eBay, a los smoothies y a la leche de soja, le llevarán sin blanca de Pensilvania a Manhattan y de ahí a Florida pasando por Atlantic City, intentando sobrevivir a sus amigos, a su propia neurosis, a su triste apartamento y a una interminable ruptura con la adorable e inestable Sheila. Mientras, Sam trata de escribir la novela que le sacará del arroyo y le salvará de la parálisis existencial en la que hace aguas su vida.

Robar en American Apparel

"This novel follows Paul, a young, Brooklyn-based author, as his drug addiction spirals out of control. Though he experiments at first in the name of artistic expression, Paul becomes consumed by apathy, tripping during interviews and drifting out of touch with old friends. He meets and marries Erin, a fellow artist drug user, and they move to Taipei, Taiwan, where they become performance artists, videotaping themselves while on drugs in public. As their relationship breaks down, Paul nearly overdoses and is finally thankful to be alive. The characters are visibly suffering from loneliness, desperately wounded self-esteem, and an aimlessness that leads them to wander from poetry reading to movie theater to party to party, making the briefest and shallowest of encounters with those around them. Tao Lin's writing style is definitively unique and mirrors the shifting reality his drugged characters perceive when submerged in their daze. At times, however, it is a haze too thick for the unencumbered reader to peer through --Sarah Grant, --www.amazon.com

Una Novela

Taipéi

Mira Gonzalez

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Fiction. Poetry. SELECTED TWEETS by Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin, dating from 2008 to 2014, as well as extras such as illustrations of each other's tweets, short stories, essays, and a long poem. SHEILA HETI: How do you imagine people read Twitter? TAO LIN: On their phones I think mostly. I think I've read the most Twitter while laying in bed or on my back, or just laying in places, like in parks or in airports. Maybe not the most, but a lot. I've dropped my phone on my face many times. I think other people must too, but I rarely hear about this. SHEILA HETI: What do you think about before you tweet? You once told me that you tweet what makes you feel uncomfortable. So which tweets do you reject, which do you accept? MIRA GONZALEZ: I wouldn't necessarily say that I tweet what makes me feel uncomfortable, I think it's more that I feel comfortable tweeting things that I would never feel comfortable saying in a real life conversation, or even in other places on the internet. For reasons that I don't fully understand, Twitter is a place where I don't feel ashamed to say my most shameful thoughts... (From "What Would Twitter Do," Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez interviewed by Sheila Heti)

Selected Tweets

Eeeee, eee, eeee

Dakota Fanning a seize ans et vit dans le New Jersey, Haley Joel Osment en a vingt et un et habite New York. Ils font connaissance sur Internet et s'éprennent l'un de l'autre, Le nouveau couple mange bio, vole dans les magasins, disserte sur la vie et l'ennui, mais échoue souvent à se comprendre. Lorsque le jeune homme vient s'installer chez sa petite amie, les personnages se dévoilent, laissant apparaître leurs failles, mais aussi les mensonges et les manipulations.

romanzo

Megan Boyle

Sofia Banzhaf

Guillaume Morissette

Nadia de Vries

Spencer Madsen

Clemens J. Setz

Ann Cotten

Lukas Valtin

Marc Degens

Moritz Müller-Schwefe

Ron Winkler

Michael Watzka

Jordan Castro

Elizabeth Ellen

Beach Sloth

Memeoji

Stacey Teague

Adeline S. Manson

Tobias Amslinger

Radikal autobiographisches Schreiben heute: Diese Ausgabe der metamorphosen widmet sich der sogenannten "Alt Lit" und der "New Sincerity". Zum ersten Mal überhaupt wird mit diesem Heft eine Auswahl an Texten der beiden Bewegungen in deutscher Übersetzung vorgelegt. Gastherausgeber Marc Degens hat Erzählungen, Gedichte, Interviews und Journale versammelt. Sie stammen von u.a. Megan Boyle, Elizabeth Ellen, Tao Lin und Guillaume Morissette. Übersetzt wurden sie von u.a. Ann Cotten, Clemens J. Setz und Ron Winkler.

Tao Lin

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