powerHouse Arena
37 Main St. at Water St., Brooklyn
Wednesday, June 5, free (advance RSVP appreciated), 7:00
718-666-3049
www.powerhousearena.com
www.taolin.info
“It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned himself to not speaking and was beginning to feel more like he was ‘moving through the universe’ than ‘walking on a sidewalk.’”
So begins Tao Lin’s third novel, Taipei (Vintage Contemporaries, June 4, $14.95), the official launch of which takes place June 5, with people walking toward DUMBO to attend the book-release party at the art gallery/bookstore/event space powerHouse Arena. (Wine will be served, and the festivities will be DJ’d by Pitchfork’s Jenn Pelly and Carrie Battan.) The follow-up to his earlier novels, 2007’s Eeeee Eee Eeee and 2010’s Richard Yates, in addition to several story and poetry collections, Taipei follows a writer as he goes off on a book tour, visits his parents in their native Taipei, and experiences disaffection with the state of his personal world. “In his tiredness and inattention these intuitions manifested in Paul as an uncomplicated feeling of bleakness — that he was in the center of something bad, whose confines were expanding, as he remained in the same place,” Lin writes. “Faintly he recognized in this a kind of humor, but mostly he was aware of the rain, continuous and everywhere as an incognizable information, as he crossed the magnified street, gleaming and blacker from wetness, to return to the party.” It’s not supposed to rain tomorrow night, when the literati gather at powerHouse to celebrate Lin, who is staking his claim to be the Millennial Generation’s Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and/or Douglas Coupland. Lin, who was born in Virginia and currently lives in Manhattan, will also be at McNally Jackson on Prince St. on June 27 at 7:00 in conversation with Christian Lorentzen, at Spoonbill & Sugartown on July 9 for a reading and Q&A, and at BookCourt on July 22 as part of a panel discussion with Marie Calloway and Ryan McNamara, moderated by Mike Vilensky. For an unfortunately out-of-focus video of Lin, who is also the founder and editor of Muumuu House, doing a guerrilla reading at MoMA on April 20 as part of Transform the World! Poetry Must Be Made by All!, go here.