For Vol.1, I reviewed Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. One bit of the review goes something like this:

Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel has no flights of fancy: no talking bears, no magic-realist interludes. The novella opens with the daily routine of its protagonist, a writer named Sam: waking in the mid-afternoon, he logs into Gmail and begins chatting with a fellow writer named Luis. Lin ably translates the detached flatness of online chats to prose; on the other hand, an evocation of flatness isn’t necessarily all that compelling — though the number of meanings the adjective “fucked” picks up over the course of the book serves as a primer on intentionally defanging the profane.

In related links, Blake Butler discusses the novella in question at HTML Giant, and Rozala Jovanovic interviews Lin at The Rumpus.