Rate this book

Shoplifting From American Apparel (2009)

by Tao Lin(Favorite Author)

3.18 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1933633786 (ISBN13: 9781933633787)

languge

English

genre

Humor

publisher

Melville House

review 1: i didn't realize what i was getting in to. tao lin is like mr. nice guy in exit through the gift shop or whatever, the banksy documentary. he is zero talent, all gimmicks. there is something to be said about his zombie voice and what his writing reflects about society, a particular generation, etc. but there are a billion writers from this generation who are doing interesting things and they're actually developing craft. having a non-style is not a style. david mitchell, who wrote cloud atlas, has said that it's not what you say but how you say it. everything really has been said. but tao lin deliberately has nothing to say, and has no interesting way to not say it. the gimmick is simply that there is literally nothing of value in anything he does, and that he is interesti... moreng only because he promotes himself so much that we're all basically forced to feign interest. i am open to different opinions about the guy but as it stands, this is the first time i have ever read through something and actually become angry about bad the writing is. the same effect could have been achieved if a 10 year old smeared poop into a 100 page 'novella' and sold it for $15 each. and the funny thing is that reactions like mine are what fuel the tao lin machine. but for my own catharsis i felt i needed to complain about this.
review 2: 1 1/2 stars really. I might have felt better about this purchase had I shoplifted it. Or I probably should just beware of anything with a brand name in the title. It's an anemic 100 pages about a writer who lives as if stuck mindlessly wandering through his life (described in short/terse/deadpan sentences...so much so that at one point I thought it was a book where every character had asperger's syndrome) disconnected from every thing/one around him. Easily digested in an hour or two, it's over before it's even started. One review I read described it as 'hipster ennui' which is probably how 60% of people will read it as (hard not to, especially as I just found out that you can actually buy this thing in an American Apparel store). The one thing I kept thinking about was a sort of similarity to Bret Ellis' American Psycho. Which is to say that both books run somewhat parallel in the idea that they're about characters affected by a modern consumer culture that's seemingly grown out of proportion to their lives. Anyway, had 'Shoplifting...' been packaged with other Lin stories I might not have felt like a jackass for dropping $13 and NY tax. I guess I'll try Taipei next and see how that goes. less

Download links for: Shoplifting from American Apparel

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