Leave Society

August 3, 2021 | Vintage Books

My fourth novel. Read the first chapter here and other excerpts here and here. View contents here. Order here. Scroll down for reviews, interviews, events, references.

"Leave Society is fascinating and touching. Lin has a unique style, with which he vividly communicates the quest for healing and love, a quest that is both particular to Lin in its details, but also underlies much of what his generation seeks through new ideas, psychedelics, and alternative lifestyles and worldviews."

—Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade

"Leave Society is a warm, funny, hearteningly nonconformist book that changed the way I think about natural health, wellbeing, and the great mystery. It’s a beautiful work of art. I loved it."

—Melissa Broder, author of Milk Fed

“Leave Society is hilarious about serious things, and serious about hilarious things. This is a very special and beautiful book.”

—Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions

"Leave Society is a novel I wanted to keep living in long after it ended. The characters are some of my favorites in contemporary fiction. Subversive, neurotic, and artful; it read exactly as I want a Tao Lin novel to read."

—Chloe Caldwell, author of The Red Zone

“No one writes like Tao Lin. He is so quietly funny, and surprising, and strange, in the way he writes sentences, in the way that he thinks. Leave Society is transcendent in its honesty and is even transcendent in its transcendency, by which I mean Tao Lin remains transparent even while delving into subject matter difficult to render on the page, like drug experiences and ponderings into the origins of philosophical systems in human societies since time immemorial. He makes the mysterious mundane and the mundane mysterious. But the book is so very readable and accessible and fun, even while exploring pain and family relationships, and yes the question about remaining a part of a society that can and will bring you harm in countless invisible ways, that has been designed to exploit the earth’s natural resources including its people. I love this novel.”

—Tommy Orange, author of There There