Shoplifting From American Apparel
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3.7 • 19 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A funny autobiographical tale about growing up in the digital age, from a groundbreaking author whose writing is “reminiscent of early Douglas Coupland, or early Bret Easton Ellis” (The Guardian)
This autobiographical novella is described by the author as “a shoplifting book about vague relationships,” and “an ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.”
From VIP rooms in hip New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a Floridian college town, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Schumann, Shoplifting from American Apparel explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something.”
“Tao's writing . . . has the force of the real.” —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Internet has spawned a generation exceedingly more awkward, apathetic and lost than any that has come before at least, this seems to be the message and intention of Lin's underwhelming novella (after Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed). Sam, a young writer with "good rankings on Amazon," works at an organic vegan restaurant and spends much of his time checking e-mails and instant messaging with his equally detached friends while wandering downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. There is, indeed, the shoplifting of a T-shirt (and, later, earphones), the acts both of which end in Sam's arrest motivated by a need for "variety." Though Lin strives to paint a portrait of a generation of disaffected youth "caught in the soft blue light of Internet Explorer," this offers little more than lackadaisical pop culture reportage that reads mostly like a diary rendered in third person.
