The day everyone has been waiting for is here. September 15th. D-day. The day that the book that’s going to save the book industry is being published. You know the one we mean. By you-know-who. His third book of fiction. The one booksellers are convinced is going to sell like crazy, drive phenomenal traffic to the stores, and lead to the sale of other books by the lesser famous writers riding on his coattails, such as Philip Roth, E.L. Doctorow, Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Lethem, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, John Iriving, Dave Eggars, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Russo — hell, even Michael Crichton is coming back from the dead to get a piece of this action.

Yes, that’s right, it’s the official pub date for Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel. According to an early review in Time Out New York, it’s “irksome” yet “fresh,” filled with “oddball dialogue” that’s, uh, somehow “charming.” The reviewer in the Village Voice — also early — gets his panties way wadded up in repeated rants about the cover of the galley, castigating the publisher (that would be Melville House), The Stranger (one of the few alt weeklies in the country not in the Village Voice chain), which is quoted on that cover, and of course the author, for “pomo gimmicry.” And a disdainful review in The Guardian says the book may well represent “the impending demise of modern American literature as we know it.”

In short, mission accomplished. Meanwhile, yet another book is being published today to ride on Lin’s coattails. But Dan Brown’s Something or Other gets treated as if it were published by an independent publisher in The New York Times — yep, they broke the embargo by writing about it before its pub date (why? because they can, and don’t you forget it), bestowing a slobbering rave.

But back to the big one: here’s a video taken by Tao Lin during his launch reading at Book Court in Brooklyn, New York …

Tao Lin at Bookcourt in Brooklyn, NY from Melville House on Vimeo.