Tao Lin’s fiction feels funny and resonant – you know how some of that so-called "K-mart fiction" feels really simple (in the "less is less" aesthetic favoured by Joy Williams, Frederick Bartheleme, Richard Ford) and makes you wonder about whether life is complex or funny? Well, the short stories in a book like Bed have a similar honesty. Miranda July put it best when describing the moods Tao writes from (boredom/tiredness/vacancy) as coming off as moving and necessary. Some people say it's disaffected but surely we all are, at least a little bit. And these characters' repetitive thoughts and attempts at lifting themselves out of the day-to-day are quietly inspired. We talked to the Brooklyn-based author and now semi-Hipster Runoff-affiliated cultural troubadour about meta-ness, writing, feelings, Gmail chats and his new novella, Shoplifting From American Apparel....

Dazed Digital: What's your new book about'?
Tao Lin: One person’s experiences in a temporally unidirectional universe of arbitrary nature, conveyed elliptically via 'the novella genre', with third-person narration, a concrete prose style, and little or no authorial rhetoric.

DD: My favourite book of yours is Bed. Do you think I will enjoy Shoplifting From American Apparel more or less?
Tao Lin: I honestly don’t know. It is different than Bed. It has considerably less sentences that I feel embarrassed to read aloud. It has less similes, metaphors, em-dashes, semi-colons, compound sentences, and rhetoric than any of my other books.

DD: I hear there are quite a few Gmail chats in the novel...
Tao Lin: The book is maybe 20 per cent Gmail chats presented in a format conventionally used for real-life dialogue. In terms of the human condition, it is not significant to me that the people in the book are talking on Gmail chat instead of 'on the phone' or 'in person'. To me the human condition means humans are conscious and therefore existentially required to create hierarchies in a universe without hierarchies; that time is unidirectional, although time for humans seems limited; and that only one unit of matter can occupy one unit of space in one unit of time. Therefore, the human condition is equally relevant if a person is born in 100 AD or 5000 BC, or is communicating through sign-language, carrier pigeon or telepathy.

DD: I have a problem – I fear that I might be a hipster, and that in reading your new book I will feel accidentally ironic...
Tao Lin: 80 per cent of self-identifying hipsters would not identify the characters in Shoplifting from American Apparel as hipsters. My advice is maybe to simply reread the previous sentence and allow it, as much as you feel is possible, to quell your fear.

DD: Do you worry very much about meta-ness or feel stumped/contained by it?
Tao Lin: I feel that 'meta-ness' can sometimes be interesting to me because, among other things, it involves infinity – in that a thing can be meta, and then it can be meta on the meta-level, and that can continue infinitely. For example, a person can be aware, then a person can be aware that they are aware, then they can be aware that they are aware that they are aware. Is there a difference between the sixth and seventh level of awareness? What is the difference? Do some humans experience meta on the infinite level during certain times of their lives, and what does that feel like, exactly?
When I think about questions like this, I feel like I’m playing a video game or being obsessed with baseball statistics (things I have done before), in that I feel like I’m leaving the world of humans to do something else not involving humans or human relationships.

DD: How much do you worry about being derivative of stuff you have read?
Tao Lin: It's not a thing that affects me because of the following: (1) I want to write what I like to read (therefore I want, to some degree, to be derivative); (2) I feel that I have been influenced by a wide range of books, therefore I feel confident that I will not naturally copy a single book or writer, but many different books or authors; (3) I view all of my work as unique in the manner that every person is unique, however tiny their quality of uniqueness might be.

DD: When your writing e-books, do you approach it very differently to an actual paper book?
Tao Lin: I think I do not approach it differently in that I feel focused mostly on what words to put in what position in order to most effectively convey a certain thing, or create a certain effect, at a certain moment in my life.

DD: How often do you experience crippling loneliness/despair? 
Tao Lin: I can’t remember experiencing crippling loneliness or despair in the last three or four years, for more than 10 to maybe 30 hours at a time. I seem always, in my adult life, to be ever aware of the choice inside of me to do something about it, and then the impulse becomes almost robotic to do something to feel better.