Lin attended New York University, where he pursued a career in writing while supporting himself through various jobs, including working in restaurants and selling items on eBay.

"[3] The description on the back of the advance galleys, distributed in early January and notably including prescription pill bottles containing candy,[4] stated: Taipei by Tao Lin is an ode—or lament—to the way we live now.

Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.

The result is a suspenseful meditation on memory, love, and what it means to be alive, young, and on the fringe in America, or anywhere else for that matter.On February 25 Publishers Weekly, in a starred review,[5] predicted Taipei would be Lin's "breakout" book, calling it "a novel about disaffection that's oddly affecting" and noting that "for all its emotional reality, Taipei is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing."

In Taipei he is a constant microscope, examining a world of miniature gestures, tiny facial movements, hands in motion, shrugs, nods, twists, ticks, flicks and snaps, a world in which the barrage of information we take in moment by moment is simultaneously cataloged, interpreted, cross-referenced, recorded, and filed.On March 14 the New York Observer included Taipei in its "Spring Arts Preview: Top Ten Books",[7] calling Lin "an excellent writer of avant-garde fiction" and Taipei "his most mature work [...] Mr. Lin has refined his deadpan prose style here into an icy, cynical, but ultimately thrilling and unique literary voice."

Taipei is a love story, and although it's Lin's third novel it's also, in a sense, a classic first novel: it's semi-autobiographical (Lin has described it as the distillation of 25,000 pages of memory) and it's a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story about a young man who learns, through love, that life is larger than he thought it was.Taipei was listed as a best or favorite book of 2013 by the Times Literary Supplement,[16] Evening Standard,[17] Slate,[18] Vice,[19] Complex,[20] Village Voice,[21] Bookforum,[22] Buzzfeed,[23] The Week,[24] Salon, Maisonneuve, and other venues.

[citation needed] A film adaptation written and directed by Jason Lester and starring Ellie Bamber, Justin Chon, Hannah Marks, Miles Robbins, and Katherine Reis was released under the title High Resolution in October 2018 through Showtime.