>>Eric Newman speaks with Eugene Lim about his novel Fog & Car. First published in 2008 and freshly brought back into print this year, the novel dilates on the experiences of a couple making a life on their own in the wake of their divorce, the novel explores loneliness, grief, and the struggles of human relation through rotating perspectives of each member of the former couple as well as the friend they share in common. Walking through the novel’s key moments, the discussion also explores how the passage of time has changed Lim’s relationship to the characters and the existential loneliness that orbits the core of Fog & Car. https://lareviewofbooks.org/av/eugene-lims-fog-and-car/
“This twinning of the fantastic with the mundane is subtle, until it isn’t. Eugene Lim has buried a layer of magic deep below the surface of the early chapters and it rises slowly as the narrative progresses. When it finally surfaces on the page, it shimmers along the edges of Sarah and Jim’s lives, turning the banal into the weird and supernatural.” —David Lewis, Compulsive Reader
“Rife with love, melancholia, grief, and a supernatural hint, Eugene Lim’s debut novel Fog & Car is a psychological mindbender with the potential to reshape and redefine fiction… Very few books published these days echo the psychological twists and bends of literary greats such as Camus. Nonetheless, Fog & Car does, and because of that, it is quite unforgettable.” —Nicole Yurcaba, Heavy Feather Review
“A Unique Voice in American Fiction… Eugene Lim’s distinctive voice and inventive narrative style set him apart from his contemporaries… a must-read.” —Shelf Unbound
To celebrate the new edition of Fog & Car — now with introduction by Renee Gladman — please join Tan Lin and Eugene Lim on
THURS July 18th, 2024 6:30pm at Yu & Me Books 44 Mulberry Street New York, NY 10013
I’m honored to be talking with the poet and writer Tan Lin. Tan and I both grew up in Ohio (“the heart of it all”), but during different eras (and via different places and ways). I think that’s what we’re going to talk about. It would be very nice if you joined us.
Hello science-fiction-inclined dharma friends, AI pessimists and evangelists, philosophers of mind, or/and followers of Korean translation,
Save the date, THUR AUG 29, for a digital gathering made possible by the LA Public Library. We’ll be reading and discussing a prescient tale by Seonghwan Park [박성환] about an AI in a Buddhist monastery who may or may not have become “enlightened.” What would this mean? What does achieving the Buddhist understanding of non-selfhood mean for the recently become self-aware robot? When it studies the self, does it forget the self?
>>TH 8/29/24 6pm PST LAPL’s Sci-Fi Short Story Club Explore Park Seonghwan’s short story “Readymade Bodhisattva” with sci-fi lovers from across the universe via Zoom, as selected by special guest Eugene Lim, on the occasion of his newly reissued novel Fog & Car. Email mtawin@lapl.org for the event link.
“Across Eugene Lim’s body of work—the four novels Fog and Car, The Strangers, Dear Cyborgs, and Search History; chapbooks, short stories, and other published prose—runs ‘a series of monologues,’ a ruthless and economical parataxis of figures and forms. The sections and subsections appear random, but they’re also dense, abstract, figurative, reiterating…”
“No one is writing like Lim. If anything, Lim forces us to articulate how we ask questions of the world—inside and outside literature. How does anyone act in retaliation or defense? How does anyone appraise and evaluate anything at all? How does one live inside this impasse?”
“The Science Fiction Writer,” an excerpt from the novel-in-slow-progress, appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #70, which you can pick up here.
Inside Issue 70—compiled by deputy editor James Yeh—you’ll find brilliant fiction (and two essays) from places near and far; including Patrick Cottrell’s story about a surprisingly indelible Denver bar experience; poignant, previously untranslated fiction from beloved Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen; Argentine writer Olivia Gallo’s English language debut about rampaging urban clowns; the rise and fall of an unusual family of undocumented workers in rural California by Francisco González; and Indian writer Amit Chaudhuri’s sojourn to the childhood home of Brooklyn native Neil Diamond. Readers will be sure to delight in Guggenheim recipient Edward Gauvin’s novella-length memoir-of-sorts in the form of contributors’ notes, absorbing short stories about a celebrated pianist (Lisa Hsiao Chen) and a reclusive science-fiction novelist (Eugene Lim), flash fiction by Véronique Darwin and Kevin Hyde, and a suite of thirty-six very short stories by the outsider poet Sparrow. Plus letters from Seoul, Buenos Aires, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Lake Zurich, Illinois, by E. Tammy Kim, Drew Millard, and more.
From the award citation: “Mimicking the paths and rabbit holes of internet searches, SEARCH HISTORY is a powerful commentary on the anxieties and alienations of diasporic identities, specifically Korean American identities—compellingly intertwining questions of art and identity with posthuman anxieties about performativity and replicability in a world beginning to grapple with the capabilities of AI. SEARCH HISTORY is a brilliantly constructed, smartly delightful, and emotionally rich short novel that positions Eugene Lim as one of our brightest experimental Asian American writers working today.”
Triple Canopy’s latest issue (#28) is titled “True to Life,” and “considers how we narrate our lives, and how these narratives provide a sense of oneself in the world (and of the world itself).”
S, thru his AA practice and his secret shamanism, introduced me to the idea of gratitude lists… and I took it to create a kind of autofiction for the issue called “Redacted Gratitude Lists from the Second Year of the Plague.” It is illustrated by Tao Lin’s rather mesmerizing mandala artwork.
The Quote Real World is many things, including this short fiction recently published in the adventurous and excellent new journal 128 Lit and an excerpt from a novel-in-slow-(illusory)-progress.
As everyone knows, in America, one cannot be a novelist and make a living at it. There are various ways around this predicament, but all—except private wealth, suicide, or crime—require day jobs. Some choose to be critics (“eunuchs at the orgy”); most choose to be professors (teaching what?), and a few get the questionable privilege of becoming the script doctors, inspiration to, or simply brand of, a movie or stream show.
Me? At the time we’re talking about, I was still young, in my late twenties. I thought I was hot shit but was making a living (barely) as a part-time dog walker and take-out-food courier. I fancied myself a writer… ________________
The Artist is often asked how much he suffered to make the piece. He replied that he didn’t suffer. I have pleasure to do the piece. Some who have written about Time Clock Piece point out how exhausted the Artist looks. Yet when Alice looks closely at the Artist’s face — in the film, in the photo stills — she doesn’t see it. What she sees is the will of a man stitching himself into time. Only after the piece was completed was the Artist disconsolate. He felt that way after all his pieces ended, he said, because it meant returning to the life of an ordinary man.
in 2018, Lisa Chen, Anelise Chen, and I had the great honor of visiting the maestro refusenik, undocumented but amnestied immigrant, godfather of performance art, and secular saint Tehching Hsieh at his Brooklyn studio. this was for The Believer, and here’s the interview that resulted. Here’s my favorite part:
Tehching Hsieh: In the beginning I couldn’t meet your kind of people. Your kind of people would say, “What is this guy, a stranger, an illegal?” Because your kind of people—this is the first time I’ve been interviewed by your kind of people in 42 years.
BLVR: Really? Wait, what do you mean, us “kind of people”?
TH: Asian American. [Laughter.] You get it! This is the first time. I’m not trying to make it an issue.
BLVR: You say this is the first time Asian Americans are interviewing you, which I find both surprising and not, but, you should know, for us, you are a very important precedent, a groundbreaker.
TH: I just wanted to say that it’s come late. Forty-two years late.
Today’s episode is a conversation with Eugene Lim, the author of the novel Search History. Eugene’s one of our favorite writers. We talk about experimental fiction, Asian writers, Eugene’s life as a school librarian, what constitutes good and bad writing, identity questions in fiction, and we even take questions from the audience who watched this talk on Discord.
“[I]t would take no more than to watch the news or check the weather to understand the scope of our ongoing losses. Lim’s goal is more ambitious: not to be a cataloguer but to ask what genre of grief could ever serve as an adequate response.” —Sohum Pal in Full Stop
“This is the sort of book that proves that the novel will never truly die, as long as there are writers like Lim venturing into new narrative territory.” —Michael J. Seidlinger in The Lineup
“The most pleasant of Search History’s many surprises is the fact that it’s really a story about grief, and is poignant and cogent in extolling this pain. The artifice of genre is everywhere, but it never stops the characters from working through their feelings.” —Nolan Kelly in Hyperallergic
the beauty of its pacing; they wait, we wait. the spiritual and subtle use of entheogens and psilocybin. most of all an intimacy and grudging acceptance of the body, aging, sickness, and death. a current xenophobia transformed into a view of nationalities and states as various, perhaps natural, oppressions. the pop of a perfect or gross or grossly perfect or perfectly gross sentence, nonchalantly written. the hard-won insights into existence, the continuation/conclusion of a steady and sublime lifework. A great book! Thank you, David Ohle!
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