/lit/ - Literature

Is there any author alive less than 40 years old whose work has a chance of achieving canonical status?

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>>4323032

Give your little shit this. I'm starting to hate your kid.

just finished reading this...

where do I go from here?

thoughts on this?

unsure if i should read or not, so much mixed reviews

So what'd you think? Love it? Hate it?

I just finished it this morning, and I gotta say, he's really stepped up his game. The recurrent motif of an "alienating private sealed-in afterlife" came full circle at the end.

>ITT: we talk about one of the greatest and most divisive prose stylists of our generation

Be honest

Are you gonna read it?

This is just a great looking cover.

Oh boy.
>'Tao Lin has made a distinctive career out of sticking to his guns, his guns being the ultra-high-res self-consciousness that characterizes our lives but which we routinely ignore in our lives and in our art. In Taipei he is a constant microscope, examining a world of miniature gestures, tiny facial movements, hands in motion, shrugs, nods, twists, ticks, flicks and snaps, a world in which the barrage of information we take in moment by moment is simultaneously cataloged, interpreted, cross-referenced, recorded, and filed. Taipei is a paean to the minutely examined life, where what is examined is every twitch, flinch, jerk, spasm, tremor, and tic, every high-speed half-formed thought, everything that we routinely consider meaningless and inessential. Here all that is turned on its head and becomes central and predominate, fundamental to being. There is no mistaking that we live a new, ultra self-conscious life, skating on the surface of things while overlaying that surface with a facsimile of the “old life” in which traditional values retain their power and majesty. What is fascinating about Tao Lin’s fiction is his willingness, nay, insistence, on sticking to the true life of the new century, as raw, flat, fatigued as it may be. In Taipei he follows an utterly modern creature through a semi-robotic life in America and Taiwan, limiting himself and his characters to reasonably accurate renderings of normal responses without the literary humanist overlay, that is to say, a world almost binary and without much in the way of conventional “emotion,” the stuff of which storytelling has forever been made. Lin is a 21st century literary adventurer, willing to work with what he actually has rather than a simulacrum of what once was, or might have been.

>>3484947
>implying