1. Confused about where we are in the book club queue? Eager to find out what’s coming later in the fall? Haven’t ever witnessed Steven Elliott use the phrase “shake and bake”? Look no further than Book Club Announcements.
2. Adam Levin, author of The Instructions, constructs an original manifesto on how to start a revolution in Time Out Chicago. First on the list: Think small. “Don’t think too much, if at all, about uprisings. Bind yourself to human beings. Have good friends and fall in love.”
3. Edward Nawotka, of the The Dallas Morning News, thinks the The Surf Guru is pretty peachy, admiring it’s “dirty realism” and quirky portraits. Read the review, which gives a synopsis of many of the stories, here.
4. A Gathering of the Tribes displays a nice little photo of Tao Lin looking perky as ever while kneeling over a toilet. OK, so there’s also a book review involved, about Lin’s novel Richard Yates. But as usual, no one can write a book review of Richard Yates without also writing a review of Tao Lin: “Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate.”
5. “His lean and often maniacal sentences propel the work forward with a slanted momentum,” writes Catherine Lacey of Tao Lin in Time Out New York. She sees Richard Yates as a meditation on loneliness. And with her reference to the characters’s “strangely unsexual sex involving lemon juice,” she seems to have a point.
6. Is Tao Lin the next big thing in urban hipster lit? Or is he just an over-Tweeted, hyper shoplifter who’s easy to dismiss? Salon meditates on how Lin “has perfectly captured the aimless malaise of the Internet generation” in a recent Writers and Writing blog post.
7. When Kelley Hoffman from Interview asks Lin about his style, Lin is adamant about one thing: “I just actually don’t have opinions about society.I can discern that certain things have an effect on certain other things but I don’t view those effects as good or bad.” Hmm. Really? Time to read more of the interview, in which Lin discusses Bret Easton Ellis comparisons and his own literary preferences.
