false 1243126 76519 276694 1933633255 9781933633251 167 <![CDATA[Eeeee Eee Eeee]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173349274m/276694.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/276694.Eeeee_Eee_Eeee 3.40 593 "Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass — from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious."—<cite>Miranda July

Tao Lin’s book blog, reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com, has made him one of the most talked-about young writers on the scene today. His commentaries taking mainstream writers to task and calling for the death of commercial writing have generated nonstop discussion and made him the subject of innumerable profiles on leading cultural websites, from McSweeney’s to Bookslut to Gawker and on. Meanwhile, his fiction appears regularly in the ’zines and websites defining the new culture.

Lin meets and surpasses all expectations in a debut novel set in the bizarre alternative reality of today’s youth culture. EEEEE EEE EEEE is a pleasingly sophisticated work, an unself-conscious yet commanding tour de force about the search for meaning in a culture gone mad with celebrities and advertising.

Depicting a group of friends transitioning between school and adulthood, Lin’s prose is strikingly stylish, funny, and lyrical, as he reminds us that youth is still—refreshingly—a time of deep questioning, poignant realization, fun, and hope. It is a place where animals talk, books and music matter, honesty counts, and you can ask, without fear of embarrassment, “What’s a Jhumpa Lahiri?”

It is a sparkling, joyous debut.

Tao Lin, also author of the story collection Bed, lives in New York City.

]]> 161218 3.69 1461 326 3 2 false Tue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Wed May 16 05:10:51 -0700 2007 Sun May 20 09:37:14 -0700 2007 then, thankfully, the book is smart and/or lazy enough to switch techniques. the episodes with bears and dolphins get deeper and become less cartoons than multi-reflecting max ernst figures. it begins to risk actual characterization and its longer sentences, seeming at first ironically used, eventually are permitted to speak sincerely.
the briefly appearing Jan is a heartbreaker.
throughout is a sortuv nihilistic worldview that refuses to be pinned down or admit that a full articulation is possible but which is interesting for its defiance.

(the poems of his i read were better, or, maybe his style better succeeds with that form... why? maybe the length of the novel reveals the style's flaws more because it's harder to sustain and his line is more prosaic than musical?...)

__________________

just begun this book last night... a beautiful provocateur and sometimes asshole... an effective and unique writer... curious about this one...


from this bookslut interview:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_05...
Q:I'd like to shift it a little to something I'm not sure you've been asked about before. What was it like to grow up Asian-American in this country? A new book called American-Born Chinese makes it out to be very hard.

A:I'm glad you asked that question. It wasn't very hard at all. I think one person called me a "chink" in about 20 years. It was the person everyone called a “redneck.” There were like 10-15 Asians in my school of about 2000. It wasn't hard. I grew up in Florida.

I want to say something else.

In Eeeee Eee Eeee the main character's parents were born in Germany. His name is Andrew. In earlier drafts Andrew's parents were from Taiwan. I did Microsoft find-and-replace and changed Andrew to Klaus one day, because I thought Andrew was too long. I wanted a one-syllable name. I think that was the reason. Then I changed Taiwan to Germany and Shanghai to Berlin, since people named Klaus are usually from Germany. Then I didn't like the name Klaus and I changed it back to Andrew. I want ideally in my fiction to edit race and name in the same way I might move or delete a comma -- in order to better communicate how existential facts manifest in conscious human beings, so that the reader can look at the sentences and read them and then feel emotions. ]]>