TRIP.

• Author: Riggs, Mike
• Position: BOOK - Tao Lin's "Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change" - Brief article - Book review

The last few years have brought a flurry of works intended to recenter psychedelic drugs as life-enhancing therapies. Fans of the genre will be pleased to know that two more such books are coming to market in 2018. The one destined to top the best-seller list is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, the high priest of health-conscious boomers via his copious earlier work on food. But don't sleep on Tao Lin's Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change.

The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Lin captured the attention of New York's alternative and literary media in the mid-2000s with his weird fiction and his belief that no detail was too trivial or personal to share with his readers. Upon finishing Taipei, his third novel, Lin was exhausted by his reliance on amphetamines to write. He then heard about Terence McKenna, the California-based psychonaut who rose to prominence in the 1990s for his meandering, outrageous...