JUNE 1, 2027 • DOUBLEDAY • HARDCOVER • 9780385552295
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In a near-future shaped by artificial intelligence and immersive virtual worlds, the lives of three strangers collide, with consequences none of them can predict.
After receiving a terminal diagnosis, Jane Kim moves to Mexico City with a plan to end her life. Elsewhere, Inspector River investigates a string of unexplained disappearances while battling “Space Plague,” a mysterious illness that is slowly erasing his memory. In a digital realm, a figure known only as Space Detective searches for a missing girl, but finds that every answer leads to another vanished life. And Yoojin Im, a struggling writer, gets an unsettling call about the novel he thought no one had read.
As these threads converge across digital and real worlds, Eugene Lim’s comic detective novel Space Bar folds into itself, a Möbius strip of intersecting lives, worlds, and realities where memory, identity, and care become inseparable. For a generation worn down by the guilt of caregiving and the uncertain grief of watching loved ones disappear, Space Bar looks at what happens when the people we love—and the selves we know—begin to slip beyond our grasp. What do we owe one another when memory fails? And what if the crises reshaping our lives, from the personal to the technological, all begin with the same failure: our inability to recognize what is disappearing until it is too late?
Lim has built a reputation as one of American fiction’s most inventive writers. Praised by Lydia Davis as “fascinating and engrossing,” he brings all his trademark innovation to Space Bar, a novel about disappearing worlds, disappearing people, and the fragile stories that keep us connected to both.
Praise for Space Bar
“Eugene Lim is one of my favorite living writers, thrillingly sweet and strange and profound. Space Bar is a book that invites you to climb inside his brain and zoom around, his most personable and mournful and funny performance to date, and it will make him one of your favorite writers too.”
—Jonathan Lethem, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn
“Space Bar is playful, ingenious, and surprisingly emotional. Eugene Lim explores new territory in tone and form, breaking apart reality and reassembling it….He takes real chances, while managing to keep the reader engaged to the very last page.”
—Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown
ABOUT
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Space Bar (forthcoming in June 2027), Search History (2021), Dear Cyborgs (2017), The Strangers (2013), and Fog & Car (2008). He is the recipient of the 44th John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Baffler, Granta, Triple Canopy, Dazed, Little Star, The Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Your Impossible Voice, Vestiges and elsewhere. He has taught at Columbia University, Long Island University, and Queens College, and is the librarian at Hunter College High School. He is the publisher of Ellipsis Press and lives in Jackson Heights, NY, with Joanna and Felix.
Here are some interviews.
Here’s a list of past and future events.
Here’s some recent writing.
Here’s an essay on experimental writing defined as an integral / lower limit WCW / upper limit Audre Lorde.
And here’s an attempt to answer the question, What Happened to the Avant-Garde?
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Want writing emailed to you? Imagine Cassandra Happy is a speakeasy gossip column, a fiction-from-life extruder, a lagging indicator of the Cognitive Revolution, an unofficial communiqué to failing sleeper agents or/and an epistolary novel, published intermittently. It is also currently a Substack.
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Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit | mspence@janklow.com
Email: eugenelim@protonmail.com
IG: @Frank_Exit