BOOK REVIEW: TAO LIN — 'SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL'

Author Tao Lin's rapid ascent into the realm of literary celebrity over the past four years, coupled with the seemingly constant threat to his career's stability that he himself fuels with gimmick-driven, narcissistic self-promotion, are entertaining for the chuckling masses of well-informed blog readers and lit junkies to observe in various forms on the internet. But these aspects of his life and the polarized quality of his growing mythos are only small fractions of what are worth gleaning from Tao Lin's never-ending stream of memetic output, because he is also a fantastic writer.

His latest release into the physically world as opposed to the digital is the autobiographical novella, 'Shoplifting From American Apparel', a thorough and thoroughly entertaining look into the life of Sam, a New York-based author, wandering through a clusterfuck of daily human interaction, while maintaining a sort of cognizance of what is going on in the context of time passing at a definite pace. The novella is full of the main character’s passionless advances through life and conveys an appreciative sense of the sadness and beauty offered a meager, intuition-guided youth of 'the fucked generation'.

Author, Tao Lin, drinking champagne.

The book is an easy read that I have managed to get through fully, twice, and skimmed over repeatedly to grasp clever minutia amidst the relative insanity of the narrative. My favorite part includes a day trip to Atlantic City, in which Sam wins eight hundred dollars, and then voluntarily loses all but twenty to save for a steak dinner he, with his vegan sensibility and awareness of how ‘shitty’ he might feel after, doesn’t buy. The book is full of moments worth reading and re-imagining using one’s knowledge of the author and the intrigue of his celebrity, while it is also excruciatingly precise in its narrative structure, and thus, worth its weight in poetic substance. I enjoyed reading ‘Shoplifting From American Apparel’ both times, and loaned it to a friend yesterday, who despite his many obligations to school and his girlfriend, has already read halfway through it.

To purchase 'Shoplifting', either visit The Tao Lin Store
Or increase his rating on Amazon by buying it for substantially cheaper here.

Tao Lin's Official Website

BOOK REVIEW: NOAH CICERO — BEST BEHAVIOR

NOAH CICERO, author — BEST BEHAVIOR (2009)

The other day, novelist Noah Cicero, The Human War (2003), The Insurgent (2009) published a rough but comprehensive (and maybe solitary) draft of his latest novel, Best Behavior, on his blog for his fans and fans of Kmart Realism in general to consume. The cast of characters for the latter half of the book include fictional transcriptions of some of today's renown internet literary personas (a group of hipster poets all three to ten years his junior), characters Cicero captures in a terse, potentially offensive recounting of his experience traveling to New York for a Nylon (not mentioned by name in the novel) Magazine photoshoot.

BRANDON SCOTT GORRELL, author — MY HAIR WILL DEFEAT YOU (forthcoming, 2010), and TAO LIN, author — EEEEE EEE EEEE (2007), RICHARD YATES (forthcoming, 2010) are depicted in the book as characters Jason Bassini and Hu Chin. (image courtesy HTMLGIANT)

The first half of the book is an in-depth look at the people the main character, Barry Baradat, surrounded himself by in his home city of Youngstown, Ohio — a group of working class midwesterners, trying to make their way through life's hardships and seemingly constant miseries, all of whom he finds he's grown to know and feel emotionally invested in — prior to the shoot, in the face of his own daily struggle to maintain charismatic, though detached, involvement in life's never-ending duties and necessities. Each introduction to a character that Barry interacts with at length, is accompanied by paragraph after paragraph of descriptive embellishment, giving the reader insight into the lives of each, flawed-to-perfection character.

I really enjoyed reading this book, partly due to my own first-hand experiences and reminiscences about the specific group of writers and artists Barry interacts with, but also out of genuine appreciation for Cicero's attention to detail and his ability to unabashedly stand by his beliefs as an American, a man, and 'an outsider,' while still acknowledging his and his peers' status as 'the fucked generation,' interacting, seemingly, in the dense mists of arbitrariness, anxiety, and constant alienation, in a vague attempt to achieve a personal sense of success and, the ever-elusive, knowingly unmaintainable, 'happiness.'

(Click the post title to view Cicero's blog/the novel)