The eagerly anticipated first fiction from one of today’s most talked-about young writers in two simultaneous publications:

Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed by Tao Lin



Eeeee Eee Eeee
A novel by Tao Lin
PUB DATE May 15, 2007 * 211 PAGES *  $14.95
ISBN 978-1-933633-25-1

Fiction / Paperback Original

 

Bed
Stories by Tao Lin
PUB DATE May 15, 2007 * 278 PAGES *  $14.95
ISBN 978-1-933633-26-8

Fiction / Paperback Original



 

“Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious.”

—Miranda July

“The simultaneous publication of Tao Lin’s debut story collection, Bed, and novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, announces a harsh and absurd new voice in writing. Employing Raymond Carver’s poker face and Lydia Davis’s bleak analytical mind, Lin renders ordinary—but tortured— landscapes of failed connections among families and lovers that will be familiar to anyone who has been unhappy…. The prose is poetic and downright David Lynch–ian."

—Time Out Chicago

"Lin’s...fiction mixes unpretentious prose and a robust sense of the ridiculous. Lin...is a newfangled writer with some excellent old-school storytelling techniques...An adventurous new talent."

—Time Out New York (May 10, 2007)

“This wry, imaginative and off-kilter novel charts the tribulations of a heartbroken pizza delivery guy living in a suburb where bears talk and dolphins attempt to commit murder.”

—Time Out New York (May 3, 2007)

Famous for his controversial book blog—Reader of Depressing Books—and for his electrifying appearances on the underground reading circuit in New York City, Tao Lin’s strikingly stylish, funny and lyrical writing has generated such intense interest that Melville House is publishing his first TWO books simultaneously.

 

In Lin’s debut novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, confused yet intelligent animals attempt to interact with confused but intelligent humans, resulting in the death of Elijah Wood, Salman Rushdie, and Wong Kar-Wai; the destruction of a Domino's Pizza pizza-delivery car in Orlando; and a vegan dinner at a sushi restaurant in Manhattan attended by a dolphin, a bear, a moose, an alien, three humans, and the President of the United States of America, who lectures on the arbitrary nature of consciousness, truth, and the universe before getting drunk and playing poker.

Meanwhile, in the award-winning short stories of Bed, college students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which—much like the Loch Ness Monster—they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough."   

 
 

TAO LIN's writing has appeared in the Mississippi Review, the Cincinnati Review, Punk Planet, Bear Parade, Other Voices, Nerve, and Noon. He is the winner of the One Story short story contest and New York University's undergraduate creative writing prize, and is the author of a poetry chapbook entitled YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM, which won the Action Books prize. His blog is called READER OF DEPRESSING BOOKS (http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com). He was born in Virginia in 1983, grew up in Florida, and currently lives in New York City.

 "The narrative of EEEEE EEE EEEE shifts so frequently and maintains such energy that it becomes difficult to stop. I began reading minutes after the book came to me in the mail. I continued reading while using the restroom and later when I went downstairs to exercise on a stationary bicycle. I held it in my hands and sweated and laughed aloud amongst the weight lifters at least three or four specific times during one scene where numerous animals have a philosophical discussion with the president. People in the gym kept looking at me. Often I was laughing because things were true...

This kind of peculiar mixture of the absurd and philosophical makes every page capable of what I think of as "exploding." Not a very precise term, but by exploding I mean that on a sentence to sentence level there is this pervasion of potential energy. ..You feel perhaps like you’re watching a Luis Buñuel film with someone you like sitting beside you holding your hand with candy in their pocket...

I know people who don’t read very often who should read this book because like Denis Johnson it’s funny and addictive and talks straight into your ear instead of from somewhere far gone. I know people who read constantly who should read this because Tao Lin’s sentences are so good they sometimes make me shudder. While doing so, or immediately after, or occasionally a long time after, they make me laugh. It’s very hard to make someone shudder and then laugh. Tao Lin persists."

—Bookslut.com