Tao Lin

Tao Lin was born on 2 July 1983 in Alexandria, Virginia, to Taiwanese immigrants. He attended New York University, graduating in 2005 with a degree in journalism. He began publishing prolifically online and in small-press venues almost immediately, becoming one of the first American literary writers to build a career through blogs, social media, and DIY publishing. He founded Muumuu House, a small press and literary website, in 2008.

Life and Career

Lin’s early work was deliberately anti-literary. Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007), his debut novel, was a surreal narrative involving dolphins, bears, and Domino’s pizza, written in a flat, repetitive style that seemed to parody the conventions of literary fiction by refusing all of them — no psychological depth, no plot arcs, no elevated diction. Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009), a novella, compressed the autofictional mode to its essence: a character named Sam walks around New York, shoplifts, uses the internet, and feels nothing in particular. The style — stripped of metaphor, affect, and decoration — was either a brilliant formal innovation or an emperor’s-new-clothes provocation, depending on the reader.

Richard Yates (2010), named after the mid-century realist novelist, was a novel about a relationship between two young people who communicate primarily through Gmail chat. The title was a deliberate taunt: this is what “realism” looks like now. The critical response was fiercely divided.

Taipei (2013) was his most substantial and widely read novel. The book follows Paul, a Taiwanese-American writer in New York, through a period of heavy drug use (Xanax, Adderall, MDMA, psilocybin, cocaine), online socialising, and a marriage, all rendered in Lin’s characteristic prose: emotionally flat, syntactically complex, obsessively precise about physical sensation and chemically altered consciousness. The novel captured something real about the experience of being young, medicated, and online in early-2010s America, and its influence on subsequent fiction — particularly online-adjacent literary fiction — has been considerable.

Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018) marked a significant turn. The book — part memoir, part investigation of psychedelic therapy, part critique of industrial civilisation — showed Lin moving from nihilistic detachment toward a sincere engagement with ecology, indigenous knowledge, and the possibility of cultural healing through plant medicines. Leave Society (2021) continued this trajectory: an autofictional novel about a writer named Li, recovering from years of pharmaceutical drug use, reconnecting with his Taiwanese parents, and developing an increasingly heterodox worldview influenced by psychedelics, Terence McKenna, and anti-industrial philosophy.

Major Works and Themes

Lin’s work is about the difficulty of feeling in a culture optimised for distraction. His early fiction’s affectlessness is not a pose but a diagnostic: it represents a generation’s experience of emotional numbing through screens, pharmaceuticals, and consumer abundance. His later work attempts to recover feeling through psychedelics, nature, and spiritual practice. The consistency of his project — from Eeeee Eee Eeee through Leave Society — is that of a writer documenting, in real time, his generation’s spiritual crisis and attempting, with increasing earnestness, to find a way out.

Taipei (2013) is his central achievement — the novel that best captures the texture of chemically modulated, internet-mediated contemporary experience. Trip (2018) is his most surprising and intellectually ambitious book. Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009) is the purest distillation of his early style.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Lin is a genuinely divisive figure. His admirers (who are numerous and passionate) see him as the most original prose stylist of his generation — a writer who found a way to represent twenty-first-century consciousness that no conventional literary approach could achieve. His detractors see calculated emptiness and self-promotion. The “alt-lit” movement he helped create has largely dissipated, but his influence on contemporary fiction — particularly on the representation of digital life, drug experience, and affective flatness — persists.

Key Works

• Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007)
• Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009)
• Richard Yates (2010)
• Taipei (2013)
• Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change (2018)
• Leave Society (2021)

Collecting Lin

Tao Lin’s books are collected by enthusiasts of alt-lit and twenty-first-century experimental fiction.

Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007, Melville House, Brooklyn) is his debut novel, published in a modest print run. Fine copies bring $75–$200.

Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009, Melville House) is sought as a cultural artifact at $50–$150.

Taipei (2013, Vintage Contemporaries, New York) is the most widely collected title. The Vintage Contemporaries original paperback is the true first edition (no hardcover was published). Fine copies bring $40–$100; signed copies $100–$250.

Muumuu House publications — chapbooks, broadsides, and editions of Lin’s poetry — are collected as ephemera of the alt-lit moment. Lin signs at readings and is an accessible figure in the literary community.