Product Description

A Editor's Choice

"[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. , 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 onbecause the hero, a young writer named Paul, takes such a meta attitude toward his own memories."Benjamin Lytal,

"Here we have a serious, first-rate novelist putting all his skills to work."Clancy Martin,

"Mr. Lin casts a spell in . . . [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,

"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

"One thing I like about Tao's writing is how beside the point for me 'liking' it feels -- it's a frank depiction of the rhythm of a contemporary consciousness or lack of consciousness and so it has a power that bypasses those questions of taste entirely. Like it or not, it has the force of the real."Ben Lerner, author of

"[A] novel about disaffection that's oddly affecting. . . . for all its emotional reality, is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing.", starred review

"Lin is an existential writer, really, less interested in tracing the contours of his particular social group than in describing the very personal and sometimes unbearable tyranny of one's own mind. . . . the novel's climactic scene. . . . builds over a few pages to a revelation that, in its sheer unexpected beauty, recalls the powerfully moving ending of David Markson's ."