Alarm Bells for a 21st Century Man

ao Lin articulates this tranquilized and morbidly solipsistic era better than any other living writer. His first novel for Vintage, Taipei, is a disarmingly sharp and bleak depiction of where human communication and connection is headed. Anyone familiar with Lin’s work will recognize this as his master thesis to date: Taipei is the final thrust of all his morbidly self-aware and bleak tweets (“daydreamed about training 2 plants to manage my gmail,” “imagined myself saying 'my brain is broken, my brain is broken' while holding my head & rapidly walking in circles around woody allen” “imagine getting your head cut in half w a piece of paper” “heard 'someone in maintenance to customer service' as 'someone in maintenance to coconut service' in fairway & grinned” “i haven't spoken yet today & i feel like i can speak fluent spanish”), and his past books, each one more specialized and narrower in scope than Taipei.