Ed Lin is a Taiwanese-American writer, actor and novelist. He is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. His first novel, Waylaid won a Members' Choice Award at the Asian American Literary Awards and also a Booklist Editors' Choice Award in Fiction in 2002. Lin has written a series of crime novels revolving around Chinese-American cop Robert Chow and set in 1976 New York City Chinatown, beginning with This Is A Bust , which won a Members' Choice Award at the Asian American Literary Awards. The sequel, Snakes Can't Run, was published in 2010, followed with One Red Bastard in 2012, both by Minotaur Books.
Waylaid, Lin's first novel is described as the story of a Taiwanese/Chinese American boy “struggling to grow up amidst the drudgery and sexual innuendo of his parents' sleazy motel on the Jersey Shore" and was a 2002 Booklist Editors' Choice in Fiction and also won a Members' Choice Award at the Asian American Literary Awards. The film adaptation directed by Michael Kang was titled The Motel and won the Humanitas Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, along with being nominated for a Best First Feature Independent Spirit Award. His trilogy of crime novels featuring Chinese-American police detective Robert Chow set in 1970s Chinatown has also won awards and garnered praise. The series comprises This Is A Bust, which garnered the 2008 Asian American Literary Awards Members Choice Award, a Booklist Starred Review, and was listed in both Best American Last Sentences of Books of 2007 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008. The subsequent books in the series Snakes Can't Run and One Red Bastard both earned a Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In 2014, Lin published Ghost Month, the first novel in his Night Market crime series set in Taipei, Taiwan. It revolves around young protagonist Jing-nan, a cynical, Joy Division-obsessed UCLA dropout forced to return to Taipei to run his family’s night marketfood stall in order to pay his late grandfather‘s old gambling debts. When he hears about the murder of a betel nut girl and finds out she happens to be his former girlfriend, he begins to investigate. In 2016, Lin released the sequel, also starring the character of Jing-nan entitled Incensed, in which he gets summoned by his uncle, a ruthless gangster, and given an order he can’t refuse: to watch over the gangster’s rebellious 16-year-old daughter. The third book in the series, 99 Ways to Die, was released in 2018 by Soho Crime, publisher of the previous Taipei Night Market novels.
Short stories and serialized fiction
He also writes a serialized fiction series, or novel in installments, "Motherfuckerland" for Giant Robot Magazine. He also has published various short stories including "Dave" and "Chinese New Year" as well as "Man Vs." about the show Man v. Food.
