By Drew Grant 11/27/12 6:42pm

The Transom

Tao Lin (Wikipedia)

The Tao of Tao: What to Expect From a Tao Lin Graduate Course

The Transom caught a 5 o’clock Metro-North train up to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville on a recent Monday night and directed the cab driver to 45 Wrexham, a new building that houses specialty programs for graduate students. Not in the habit of auditing English classes, we remained silent as the seats filled with gradate students, all chattering before their workshop with enigmatic writer Tao Lin. The course? “The Contemporary Short Story.”

If you were wondering what kind of people fork over money for a class taught by the guy who live-blogged Hurricane Sandy for Thought Catalog while on Ecstasy, well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect. Read More

By Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke 10/29/12 9:41am

Here Come the Stories of the Hurricane

Tao Lin

Thoughts and Feelings: Tao Lin’s Hurricane Liveblog

Do you like your hurricane coverage with a healthy dose of ennui? Do you find most Hurricane Sandy news too “newsy”? If you want to read about how the hurricane makes people feel, about what it does for hopes, dreams, unfulfilled goals, general anxiety and drug intake, then maybe you should be reading Tao Lin’s liveblog over at Thought Catalog.

Stay tunned as Mr. Lin and other Thought Catalog contributors feel the crushing dread and anxiety of being alive–all while dealing with the reality of being stranded inside during a storm. Read More

By Drew Grant 10/16/12 5:49pm

books

The bounty

Unpacking Tao Lin

Last month, The Observer reported on the fire sale of short-prose author Tao Lin’s personal affects. Everything must go! And hey, we even helped him raise some money. Some of us may have even bought an “assorted collection of books” for $50, and then waited with increasingly doubt over its arrival.

But last night, we were rewarded for financial supporting the cause of making sure Mr. Lin’s Luna Bar supply was fully stocked. Why ever settle for an NPR tote bag when you could get this for your donation? Read More

By Drew Grant 9/26/12 9:00am

Tao Lin

16 Photos

photo-35

Tao Lin’s Juvenilia: A Catalog of Author’s Art, Work for Purchase

Post-wunderkind New York literary staple Tao Lin has either spent or not received the majority of the $50,000 he was to receive from for Vintage/Knopf for his book Taipei, the Bret Easton Ellis-meets-Siddhartha novel that is due to the publisher any day now. And if you’ve been keeping track, the author has not been cut a check by Sarah Lawrence either, where he teaches classes on the contemporary short story. (No word yet on how much Vice is paying him to make Photoshops of drug-related imagery.)

This has left Mr. Lin broke and, for at least the second time in his career, desperate enough to sell all of his possessions. While the first round of self fund-raising in 2011 involved a Vimeo showcase of his eBay items, this weekend’s cry for cash was limited to a now-deleted tweet and a correspondence with The Observer over what he’s willing to part with. Read More

By Drew Grant 9/24/12 9:10am

starving artists

Tao Lin, selling his shit (Megan Boyle)

Buy Tao Lin’s Juicer: Cash-Strapped Author Sells All His Stuff on Twitter

The life of a successful writer isn’t as lucrative as Franco or Franzen would have you believe. Just ask Tao Lin: Saturday evening, the micro-messaging wunderkind sent out a tweet asking if anyone wanted to buy his stuff. All of it. Like, all of it. (The tweet has since been taken down.)

Some sort of viral marketing stunt? Maybe, but he’s done this kind of house cleaning before. Since we were in need of a good microwave, we took the bait and emailed him. Within five minutes, we received a reply: Read More

By Emily Witt 8/15/11 1:05am

Book Deals

Lin.

Tao Lin Announces Five-Figure Sale of Taipei, Taiwan to Vintage; Tim O’Connell, ‘Prolific Tweeter,’ to Edit

As the foremost chronicler of the young novelist Tao Lin’s every whim, The Observer was hoping we might break the story of Tao Lin’s next book deal, which he announced he was shopping a couple weeks back. Then, on a Sunday when our moods were already dampened by incessant rain and the looming prospect of Monday, Mr. Lin wrote to inform us that we had lost the story to Mike Vilensky at The Wall Street Journal. So he granted us an interview. Read More