Taipei by Tao Lin
"[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