1. Tao Lin is an American novelist, poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist.
12 Facts About Tao Lin
1. 2.
Tao Lin has published four novels, a novella, two books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, as well as an extensive assortment of online content.
3.
Tao Lin quit his job after selling shares of the future royalties of his novel Richard Yates online in 2009.
4.
Tao Lin has lectured on his writing, poetry, and art at Vassar College, Kansas City Art Institute, Columbia College, UNC Chapel Hill, and other universities and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum.
5.
Tao Lin's writing has attracted negative and positive criticism from various publications.
6.
The Atlantic described Tao Lin as having a "fairly staggering" knack for self-promotion.
7.
Tao Lin's work has been praised in the UK, including positive reviews from The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, which called Tao Lin "a daring, urgent voice for a malfunctioning age", and a 2010 career overview by the London Review of Books.
8.
Tao Lin is brilliant at capturing the moments in a relationship where everything turns bad at once.
9.
Tao Lin is one of the few fiction writers around who engages with contemporary life, rather than treating his writing online as existing in opposition to or apart from the hallowed analog space of the novel.
10.
Tao Lin's writing reveals the hyperbole in conversational language that we use, it seems, to make up for living lives where equanimity and well-adjustment are the most valued attributes, where human emotions are pathologized into illness: we do not fall in love, we become "obsessed"; we do not dislike, we "hate".
11.
Much of the book is devoted to Tao Lin's continuing fascination with the life and thought of Terence McKenna, as well as an introduction to McKenna's ex-wife Kathleen Harrison.
12.
Tao Lin now believes that the world has an inherent purpose.