Taipei
Tao Lin's narrator, Paul, is a young writer living between New York and Taipei, taking pills, attending readings, and converting every experience into material before it has time to feel like one. The prose is flat on purpose: affectless, internet-paced, and occasionally funny in the way a chat log can be funny when read years later, with all its deadpan punctuation intact.What the novel lacks in conventional plot it makes up for in texture. Relationships are negotiated through screens, drugs, and the persistent anxiety that sincerity might be just another performance to archive. Published under Vintage Contemporaries, it captures a particular post-2000s urban drift with enough accuracy that the book sometimes feels like a social document disguised as autofiction, complete with its own ambient loneliness. For readers who have ever treated a feeling as content.
