Taipei Carbs

April 30, 2013, 3:52pm

Over the next month, in celebration of the forthcoming release of Tao Lin's latest novel, Taipei, we will be featuring a weekly selection of photos taken by the author during his recent trip to Taipei, Taiwan. While there, he took thousands of pictures with his iPhone, pictures which he has divided into albums titled things like "Taipei fashion," "Taipei food," "Taipei babies," and "Taipei animals," among others. The images were taken between January and February 2013 during one of his semiannual visits to the Taiwanese capital, where his parents live. This selection is titled "Taipei Carbs." All photos and captions by Tao Lin. Taipei will be released on June 4 from Vintage and is available for pre-order now. To read an early excerpt from the novel that we published in 2011 titled "Relationship Story," click here.

I seem to rush, whenever I see this photo, to think Huffington Post quickly, like I'm answering a question before someone else does

Al Gore should abruptly stumble cross-stage during a TED talk, falling to his knees, when his vision is replaced with this photo, which he's never seen, for 2.5 seconds

my dad eating an "oil stick" (literal translation from Mandarin)

if you move your face within ~4 inches of the screen & stare at the man on the right side of this photo he will appear to move, in place, a little

a bread tree in full bloom

no one in this photo remembers why or how—or when—they stopped selling bouncy balls & other small, colorful toys & started selling metastasized stumps of brown carbs

these gelatinous carbs sometimes fly toward people's faces without warning or explanation

by stocking only "uneatable carbs," as he calls them, this man believes the media will profile him

mankind—represented here by a depressed, vision-impaired hunchback—is mere spectator, via peripheral vision, if at all, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Taipei's shiniest, crispiest, most skillfully butter-infused carbs