Tao Lin Books in Order

If you want the best single starting point: Taipei → Leave Society
If you want something short first: Shoplifting from American Apparel → Bed
If you want the early, strangest fiction: Eeeee Eee Eeee
If you want nonfiction and ideas: Trip
If you want poems and online fragments: You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am → Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy → Selected Tweets

Tao Lin was born in 1983 in Virginia to Taiwanese immigrant parents and grew up in Central Florida. He later studied journalism at New York University, which fits the surface of his writing: plain, exact, and interested in what people actually do and say.

He started publishing young. Before most writers have much of a bookshelf at all, Lin was already putting poems and prose into magazines, online spaces, and small presses. By his early twenties he had published the poetry collection You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am, then followed it with the story collection Bed and the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee. That early run also showed something that would stay true for the rest of his career: he was not waiting for a neat, traditional path before making work public.

He came up on the internet as much as in print.

That matters because his books often treat chat logs, timelines, search habits, and tiny daily actions as serious material. Eeeee Eee Eeee is still the oddball among his novels, surreal and full of talking animals, but even there the emotional center is recognizable: awkwardness, drift, and a person trying to make sense of being alive without pretending to be more certain than he is. He is often interested in repetition, boredom, and the half-distracted mind.

With Shoplifting from American Apparel, Richard Yates, and especially Taipei, Lin moved closer to fiction built from contemporary life. These books follow young writers, couples, and friends through apartments, parties, Gchat conversations, book readings, family trips, and long stretches of numb drifting. New York, Florida, and Taiwan keep reappearing as emotional as well as physical places. Readers who click with him tend to like the dry humor, the stripped-down sentences, and the way he notices the small behaviors people usually edit out.

He writes a lot about distance, even when two people are in the same room.

His later books open outward a little. Trip is his first book-length nonfiction work, mixing memoir, research, and questions about psychedelics, recovery, and consciousness. Leave Society stays close to a writer named Li as he moves between Manhattan and Taipei, spending more time with parents, chronic pain, daily routines, and the harder question underneath all of it, how to live without feeling flattened by the world.

Across the books, certain things keep returning: loneliness, family, technology, altered states, self-observation, and the blurry line between real life and the story a person tells about it. Even Selected Tweets, his collaborative book with Mira Gonzalez, fits that pattern. It turns online fragments into something like a diary, a performance, and a record of connection all at once. His poems do something similar, using a casual voice to carry anxiety, jokes, and abrupt turns into sadness.

Outside his books, Lin founded and edited the independent press Muumuu House and has taught in Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program. He lives in Hawaii now. The subjects and forms change from book to book, but the through line is steady: ordinary behavior, strange thought patterns, and a refusal to smooth life into something neater than it is.