Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin, 3:AM’s former Poetry Editor, is reviewed in today’s Guardian:
Writing that looks artless is a difficult trick to pull off. This trancelike and often hilarious novella by a cultish young New York writer is all about that trick, and the unusual pleasures it smuggles in just below its seemingly flat surface. The tone of apparently apathetic hipsterism is set early on.
[...]
Lin’s writing is reminiscent of early Douglas Coupland, or early Bret Easton Ellis, but there is also something going on here that is more profoundly peculiar, even Beckettian. The text is woven around large chronological and informational lacunae, which issue near the end in one revelation about a character’s travails that is the more troubling for Lin’s principled refusal to let it disturb the text’s placid veneer.”
Related: 3:AM’s Tao Lin Week: Day One ['Serious literature: a short film'] / Two ['cognitive-behavorial therapy redux': six unpublished pages] / Three ['Serious word games'] / Four ['Check out the brain stem on Tao: an interview] / Five ['We are so "tao lin" right now'].
First posted: Saturday, November 14th, 2009.
