Book review: Taipei, By Tao Lin

 

Emma Hagestadt
Monday 12 August 2013 16:25 BST
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Tao Lin, is a literary provocateur who sold shares in his previous novel, Richard Yates, for $2,000 a pop and cheekily claimed that his favourite piece of work was a tweet.

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This third novel is a poetically oblique bildungsroman set in the Internet age. Paul is constantly in motion, travelling from Brooklyn to Las Vegas, and Toronto to Taiwan. He's also on the move in cyberspace, glued to Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook.

It's only during a chat about sex with his girlfriend, Erin, that he finds himself relinquishing the usual electronic props. This generation's answer to Coupland.

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