I’ll be at Naropa on October 4th. I’ll be giving a talk at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University on October 4th at 2:30PM (and I believe the class is open to all). That evening, I’ll participate in a reading with Jeffery Pethybridge, Sara Veglahn & Gabrielle Lessans. Details about the reading here: http://naropa.edu/academics/jks/events/index.php
And I’ll be reading at Wesleyan University on November 30th at 8PM.
loved this book. celine and julie are two narrative mirrors erupting out of a desert in new mexico. consistently smart. a work that through anecdote, analysis, and aphorism — along with elemental doses of despair and anger — exposes the systemic construction and confines of “girlhood,” arguably defined here as an integral, lower limit Tiqqun upper limit Bratmobile.
or, another way: the various acts of defining found to be inextricably tautological to the problem. this dilemma at the heart of the book. murphy in an interview says: “For a long time the manuscript was developing as a longer and longer narrative essay and a series of poems. Both tried to get at some central questions, namely: Why does girlhood feel like a trap?…”
published by the on fire Canadian small press bookthug : won’t you seek it out?
joni murphy interviewed by chris kraus
and with tobias carroll:
I needed to find a way of communicating that this story was not really about the two main characters, that fiction uses individuals to get people to care about society, but that can become a way of fetishizing the singular. I would never write a story from the point of view of a girl working in a maquiladora in Juarez, but neither would I want to just describe their bodies as things (as Bolaño did to devastating effect in 2666) because I related to them as beings, but at the same time I am not in their position.
So the end of this book, this different style, was my way of saying individuals matter, but we’re all embedded in systems and structures. They/ we belong to a world of connections in which we’re told these connections don’t exist. Only when a pattern is overwhelmingly horrific does it get recognized as a pattern.
I’ll be at the brand spanking new Queens Book Festival on Sunday, August 7th, at 5PM. The venue has moved and the fest is now at the Kaufman Astoria Studios. I’ll be speaking on a panel is called “The East is No Longer Far: The Power of Storytelling” and will be with authors Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan,Gina Apostol, Hirsh Sawhney, and Mia Alvar. Register for free tickets here.
Don’t you know? A mother’s love
neglects pride
the way fire
neglects the cries
of what it burns.
A terrific collection, which at times grazes the sentimental, but even then transforms it into bittersweet knowledge, THE EMPTY ROOM functions, in its selection of stories over decades, as a mediated autobiography of an extraordinary life. All “selected works” inevitably can be seen this way, but it seems purposefully done here (and Toming Jun Liu’s enlightening translator’s afterword even argues it can be read as a “linked bildungsroman”).
A well known writer and painter in China — this is his first collection in English — Mu Xin was born in 1927 and survived the Cultural Revolution, imprisonment, and exile. And this book, like Mu Xin himself, crosses from classical Chinese literature to western nouveau roman fragmentation and back again. In a way the book can also be seen as cousin to the fiction-essay hybrids of a Sebald or an Emil Cioran or a Paul Valéry or a Maggie Nelson (which themselves could be called, with only a little imagination, western reflections of sanwen or suibi/zuihitsu traditions)…
The stories span worlds, as makes sense of a collection written during exile (in Forest Hills, Queens). The first story “The Moment When Childhood Vanished” is almost a pre-modern fable about childhood with a sly allusion to Chao-chou’s Newborn Baby koan (case 80) in the Blue Cliff Record; while the title story is an imagistic love poem (but with images that could have been provided by David Lynch); “Notes from Underground” is a profound meditation on solitary confinement that recalls Mu Xin’s actual imprisonment; and “Fong Fong No. 4” depicts the horror and transformational power of the Cultural Revolution through a seemingly quotidian prism of the aging of a love affair’s participants…. In fact each story is in tone and technique quite different, yet a unifying voice and mind clearly is evident throughout this belyingly slim, sorrowful, and sublime triumph.
buy AN EMPTY ROOM or
find it at your library.
a book of books. it ends, after several transmutations (and before a coda of only a slightly lighter shade) with some dark dark evil. i liked it best when this historical novel with its characters unblessed with political correctness spotlit the hidden racism of the present. and the memorable, thinly veiled critique of APOCALYPSE NOW (the vietnam war movie that via good old american megalomania redacted from itself any speaking roles for vietnamese*). great terrifying opener. great terrifying closer. in between it moved swiftly and darkly through worlds.
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an excerpt, on some american dark hearts:
By the movie’s last shot, of innocent Danny Boy sitting in the open doorway of a Huey helicopter ascending slowly into the clear blue heavens, weeping as he gazed over his war-ravaged homeland, destined for a country where women’s breasts produced not just milk but milkshakes — or so the GIs told him — I had to admit to the Auteur’s talent, the way one might admire the technical genius of a master gunsmith. He had hammered into existence a thing of beauty and horror, exhilarating for some and deadly for others, a creation whose purpose was destruction. As the credits began rolling, I felt touched by shame for having contributed to this dark work, but also pride in the contributions of my extras. Faced with ungraceful roles, they had comported themselves with as much grace as possible. There were the four veterans who played VC RAPIST #1, VC RAPIST #2, VC RAPIST #3, and VC RAPIST #4, as well as the others who had made their screen debuts as DESPERATE VILLAGER, DEAD GIRL, LAME BOY, CORRUPT OFFICER, PRETTY NURSE, BLIND BEGGAR, SAD REFUGEE, ANGRY CLERK, WEEPING WIDOW, IDEALISTIC STUDENT, GENTLE WHORE, and CRAZY GUY IN WHOREHOUSE.
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PS in this interview, nguyen says,
One of the things that characterizes both Vietnamese and Asian American literature is that it’s often times not very angry. There’s not a lot of rage, at least not in the past few decades. And if there is anger or rage, it has to be directed at the ignorant: the Asian country of origin or Asian families or Asian patriarchs. While all that is important, I sensed a reluctance to be angry at American culture or at the United States for what it has done. That’s why, in the book, I adopt a much angrier tone towards American culture and the US.
this reminded me of an overlooked asian american novel that is angry, though it uses humor in a way not unlike paul beatty: yongsoo park’s BOY GENIUS.
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(a side thought a few days after finishing the book… the happa’s multiracialness reads as contextually chameleon’ed/camouflaged. in The Sympathizer’s particular case, he reads most of the time, despite the book’s explicit attempts to foreground his “bastard” identity, as asian. this has less to do i think with any automatic othering by white characters (or by readers) but race operating (differently from gender) in prose. in this mediated form, racial identity performance, absent immediate markers, cannot effortlessly sustain its foregroundedness — and this is especially true of multiracial’s less rigid category.)
https://www.facebook.com/events/1310672165614968/
http://www.threesbrewing.com/eventscalendar/2016/5/5/fiction-stranger-than-fiction
Fiction Stranger Than Fiction: Anelise Chen, Lisa Chen, John Haskell, Eugene Lim, and John Madera
Join us for a reading series spotlighting writers whose work “explodes” language, content, form, and structure. Following the readings, John Madera will lead a conversation with all the readers.
Date: Thursday, May 5, 2016
Time: 7:00pm-9:00pm
Venue: Threes Brewing
Address: 333 Douglass Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Website: http://www.threesbrewing.com/Anelise Chen earned her MFA in fiction at NYU. She is currently fiction editor at The Margins, a publication of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Born in Taipei and raised in Los Angeles, she lives in Manhattan’s Chinatown. She teaches at Columbia University. (www.anelisechen.com)
Lisa Chen was born in Taipei, Taiwan. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Iowa. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a freelance writer and editor. (www.kaya.com/authors/lisa-chen)
John Haskell is the author of a short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), and the novelsAmerican Purgatorio (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and Out of My Skin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). His stories and essays have appeared on the radio, in books, and in magazines. He’s taught writing and literature at Columbia University, Cal Arts, and the Leipzig University. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and lives in Brooklyn.(www.johnhaskell.home.mindspring.com/)
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels Fog & Car and The Strangers. His writings have appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly,exploring FICTIONS, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket2, The Coming Envelope, Everyday Genius, Dazed Digital, Sleepingfish, elimae, Little Star, and elsewhere. He is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press, works as a librarian in a high school, and lives in Queens, NY. (https://eugenelim.com)
John Madera holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. His work may be found in Conjunctions, the Believer, Sonora Review, the Brooklyn Rail, the Collagist, DIAGRAM, the Millions, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, theQuarterly Conversation, and many other venues. He edits the forum Big Other. Madera also runs Rhizomatic: Publicity Services for Small Presses with Big Ideas. (www.johnmadera.com / www.rhizomatic.org / www.bigother.com)
pretty crazy. and not a little side order of misogyny. late in the novel the narrator has dream about saving his step-daughter, who his lust for pretty much forms the core of the book, from the nazis. there’s also the wife who runs the brothel and whom the narrator falls in love with becuz she was working class and thus genuine …all described in narrator’s metafictional diary, which is prepwork for the real novel — and thus full of asides on which is real-er.
over. the. top.
but there is no doubt a genius displayed in it. and its grappling with modernity seems fresh. it is dizzying to think how prominent moravia was just fifty years ago, and compare this with now how he’s unthought of, almost dismissed (except perhaps as a dim memory via godard and cinema). the paris review interview with him from 1954 is, while trying to strike a tone of defiance, utterly reverential.
Here’s a beautiful, caustic bit from the novel on the state of journalism, which (technology advances aside) could’ve been written yesterday:
Still clasping his wife’s hand in his own, Consolo resumed: “You ask me to tell you what is the formula for the modern newspaper article. I will answer you with an analogy. You know the moving staircases in the big shops, with people going up and down continually and yet standing still on the stairs? Well, you’ve created what I call the moving-staircase newspaper article… What is the object of moving staircases–or, in fact, of any sort of machine? To save time and fatigue. Your articles, indeed, save the readers time and fatigue. They jump, so to speak, onto the first line and then, in a moment, without making the slightest effort, almost without noticing it, they find themselves, as if by magic, at the last line. They haven’t moved; it is the article that has moved. Actually, they haven’t even read the article; it is the article that has caused itself to be read, or rather, that has read itself. A moving staircase, in fact” (257-8).
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and this prognosticating from that 1954 interview:
INTERVIEWER
Incidentally, what do you think of the future of the novel?
MORAVIA
Well, the novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce. They were the last of the nineteenth-century writers—great writers. It looks now as if we were going toward the roman à idée or toward the documentary novel—either the novel of ideas, or else the novel of life as it goes on, with no built-up characters, no psychology. It’s also apparent that a good novel can be of any kind, but the two forms that are prevalent now are the essay-novel and the documentary novel or personal experience, quelque chose qui arrive. Life has taken two ways in our time: the crowd and the intellectuals. The day of the crowd is all accident; the day of the intellectual is all philosophy. There is no bourgeoisie now, only the crowd and the intellectuals.
A state power co-opts the intense, ingroup binding, herding force of social media with agents who incrementally steer comment strings toward desired perceptions. The protagonists begin by having racist but also anti-business views. However, through the subtle messaging of agent provocateurs, these come to sublimate their racism into anti-government stances, which not coincidentally happen to be pro-business. Or, anti-racist activists and white socialists are encouraged to radicalize rather than form a coalition. Or, less fantastically, a cyborg who falls in love with a robot is brainwashed into thinking Planet X19 will be haven for their illicit romance. The book is called THE NETWORK ENTANGLES or TWO PLUS TWO IS FINE.
Last night, I finished Diane Fujino’s biography of Richard Aoki and wanted to write a quick note/review on it…
Because of its method, which is largely a presentation of Richard Aoki’s autobiographical oral history, the book is an odd mix of autobiography and biography. We read Aoki in first person talking about his parents breaking up in the internment camps, his time in the army, his involvement with the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, the Asian American Political Alliance, the Third World Liberation Front strike, and so on. Fujino then adds her own commentary at the end of each chapter (and throughout also has useful, extensive footnotes).
A few quibbles with this necessary and important work… While her method gives us a direct and a useful sense of Aoki’s style, the reliance on interview-transcription allows Aoki to guide and frame his story often to the detriment of context, and Fujino’s followup commentary often seemed more redundant than clarifying. As well, since the interviews were no doubt extensively edited for clarity (for a minor example Fujino says in one footnote that she added words to give a statement context; p 369, note 17) it would be informative to know more about this editing process.
Reading this in 2015, three years after the informant revelations, to say the obvious and easy: many episodes beg for reconsideration and revision. The book if nothing else is a continuous lesson in historiography.
Obviously much to chew over, but two things stay with me in particular. Whatever status he had, his almost play-by-play account of the TWLF strike at Berkeley was deeply moving. Even though I don’t really care to read tactical or military history–and Aoki’s accounting of the strike (the costliest in UC history) seems unique in that it focused mostly on such things–and even though I’m reading as someone partly already suspicious of his motives, Aoki’s palpable involvement and risk, as well as the investment and risk of so many others, to create a program of academics where they could self determine their own education, is astounding and very moving.
The other episode, and one that seems virtually unrelated to any stain due to his informant activity, is Aoki’s reaction to the riots after the Rodney King verdict. At this point he’s a college administrator and a colleague says to him, “Richard, how’s it feel? You know how to start riots. Now you’re getting paid to stop one.” It’s not a little disturbing to read him confronting that conflict, thinking about the trap he’s in as an employee of the state. Aoki’s assessment of the radical left’s losses as nearly total since 1968 is also familiar and familiarly disheartening.
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PS Today, following up in the library, I read one of the more radical revisionist readings of Aoki’s informant activities. According to Black Studies professor and Aoki friend, Douglas Henry Daniels, being paid by the FBI (for assumed useless knowledge) was, “one of the earlier attempts to recoup remuneration for the internments…” Ha! I’ll take that for a dollar!
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Other Aoki resources I found useful:
Momo Chang’s good summary of the revelations of Aoki’s informant activities and its aftermath.
The A-Files: Richard Aoki & the FBI, written by Aoki friends Belvin Louie & Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, discusses what it was like as close friends to hear and process the informant news.
Mostly behind a paywall, A Richard Aoki Forum: What Does It Take to Destroy a Legend? appeared in Amerasian journal and has responses by several Aoki supporters, including his close friend, long-time activist Harvey Dong.
Why Couldn’t Richard Aoki Have Been an Informant? by Tamara Nopper
And the excellent multi-part, in-depth coverage of Aoki in Hyphen Magazine by Momo Chang and others: Who Was Richard Aoki?
The Aoki documentary
AWP is pronounced mwahaha i’d said and meant but nonetheless had a good time there and met and talked with good folk . but the demographics of the event brought me to think and talk about and keep thinking about the mongrel coalition against gringpo … some said they saw the mongrels by what they’re particularly reacting against and so as all about KG and conceptual poetry, which frankly i could give two shits about. for me i love the mongrels cuz they give voice to an anger and to unsaid, long-suppressed complaints not through academic footnote but with shotgun poetry. (i love the mongrels too cuz they could give a shit whether i don’t or do.) so my ardor is not precisely becuz their enemy is my enemy since their enemy number one is floating methane on some not-mine moon. it’s for me less to do with anti-CP than finally making more visible the way power moves (and thus how oppression done) : making more visible how that happens in my own then shamed mind and in those important rooms. so i love the mongrels. it may all turn robespierre next month but the initial strikes are mayhem and genius.
Little Star #6 (2015) is here! Already on shelves at Greenlight and Book Culture, on the way to St. Mark’s, McNally Jackson, Porter Square, Powell’s, more. Order here littlestarjournal.com/issues
Thanks to editors Lincoln Michel and James Yeh, I’ve a short piece called “Normcore” in the upcoming Gigantic. The issue is available now for pre-order for a mere eight bucks — includes shipping!
Launch party on 10/18: https://www.facebook.com/events/1473548316257710
Our forthcoming issue complicating and, in some cases, demolishing understandings of comedy and jokes features new or newly translated fiction by Franz Kafka, Jincy Willett,Amelia Gray, Daniil Kharms, Osama Alomar, and Mike Topp; a special fold-out “New Gigantic-er” poster featuring cartoons by Roz Chast, Carolita Johnson, Drew Dernavich, Michael Crawford, and Corey Pandolph; interviews with comic book artist Gabrielle Bell and writer J. Robert Lennon; the latest installment of Joe Wenderoth’s Seizure State; the winner of our first-ever Penny-a-Word contest; illustrations by Andrew Bulger; and much, much more—all in a unique, uniquely Gigantic“grab-bag” format designed by Erin Grey West.
Arriving at bookstores in October, pre-order available now for the special price of $8 (save $4! including shipping and handling).
Great thanks to Keith Newton for including an excerpt from my novel THE STRANGERS in the 2nd issue of Secret Behavior magazine.
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The second issue of Secret Behavior will launch at the New York Art Book Fair at PS1 in Queens. If you are local or visiting NYC please stop by our booth, the fair opens Thurs evening Sept 25th, and it is all day Fri 26th- Sun 28th.
Featured in Secret Behavior Issue 02: Kostas Anagnopoulos, Tom Andes, Morton Bartlett, Lisa Blair, James Brett, Nicola Canavan, John Clang, Victor Cobo, Marilène Coolens & Lisa De Boeck, Jonathan Durbin, TR Ericsson, Farrah Field, Jason Glasser, Nicolai Howalt, Susanna Howe, Rachel Kash, Brian Kenny, Erik Kessels, Eugene Lim, Malerie Marder, Myriam Meloni, Keith Newton, Jason Porter, Jana Romanova, Amanda Ross Ho, Juliana Sabinson, Mathias Svalina, André Viking, Jack Webb, Eric White
Order the issue here: http://secretbehavior.bigcartel.com/product/secret-behavior-issue-02-family
Thanks to Stephen Beachy, I’m happy to have some fiction in the latest edition of YOUR IMPOSSIBLE VOICE, a digital magazine. Maybe you’d like to download its elegant bits and read them on one of your exobrains? … My story takes place in a karaoke bar and has in it a rambling about life in Queens that goes:
I leaned toward Gus and hoping not to appear rude by talking during our friend’s performance (but she wasn’t paying any attention to us; when she was singing Muriel was truly transported to a different dimension), I said, “The thing about this corridor of our city – from Woodside through Elmhurst through Corona through Flushing and on to Bayside and beyond – an incredible swath, at times like the Kowloon Walled City in its density and inventive bricolage, and superseding it in terms of the diversity of its immigrant populations, is that this often praised mixing shoulder to shoulder of people from every dominion on the planet breeds a respectful and intimate but insuperable separation, which is made all the more vexing due to proximity. In the morning one can see the parents of – among many others – Sikh children and Uruguayan children, Romanian children and Cameroonian children, Bhutanese children and Basque children all dropping off their kids at the school. One perhaps can’t imagine such a sight without experiencing it first-hand. The place is awash in color of both traditional costumes and very au courant if off-the-rack business casual; the Cantonese-inflected English mixes with scrubbed Midwestern and Punjabi lilt as I hear striver family heads discussing playdates and swapping recipes. Nowhere on any other place on earth does this prismatic confluence occur. And yet for its singularity, everyone is rather ho hum about the spectacle. The smoothing of all that difference into capitalist civility is remarkably unremarked upon. Oh the omnipotent digestive juices of the market’s gut – it eats it all! And maybe the non-remarking is but one other aspect of the digestive process. (How quietly it eats!) So it’s true that one, in a moment of weakness, could think it a commercial for American utopia and racial harmony: the interlocking of all these communities, the painless and insidious assimilation, the simultaneous proud and painful resistance to that assimilation, the flow of first to second to third and fourth generations, the seemingly unifying and seemingly ubiquitous materialist ambitions. And yet like the city itself the complex is unknowable, one’s neighbors are so close yet so far away, we each find ourselves alone and lonely, and the functioning diversity miracle itself is only another demonstration of how far short the most miraculous will fall in the futile ambition to save ourselves from ourselves.”
I paused as Muriel finished her second song and the room again convulsed in raucous applause. She waited with great showmanship before beginning her concluding number: “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. On hearing the first notes the crowd instantly went wild.
I had to shout in order to be heard but leaned closer to Gus and yelled, “And yet at other times – when I trundle down its street and avenues, weary from my day’s labors or the prospect of my nightly ones, when I am going to the greengrocer for bell peppers and onion to make another basic bachelor’s supper, when I stop to hear the busker’s tambourine for just a minute before shyly dropping in a few coins, when I order some sweetly marinated meat over rice from the food trucks, when I’m in line to buy Band-Aids and deodorant at the pharmacy – at these times I look around and see all my harried neighbors doing the same, the gimpy and spry, ill- and sweet-tempered, nebbish and vampy, and yes it’s then I do believe in some unity of purpose, despite the chaotic provenances of Diaspora City, and I see the essential program provided to all is not to acquire or win but rather is just to exist – and to avoid pain – and we are not at all making the world and are therefore not at all responsible, but in the moment have only been given it, the prospect and circumstance of the hour, and we are forced to navigate this place, each of us, as best we can.
“Then I think: Fellows! Sisters! Cousins!
“But,” I concluded “the feelings then, while not marked so much by loneliness, are drenched with a resembling error, namely self-pity.”
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The fall issue of Your Impossible Voice is here with incredible new work from Aaron Shurin, Eugene Lim, Kathleen Jesme, Mary Carroll-Hackett, Fernando Vallejo (translated by Laia García Sánchez and Robert Jackson), Kyle Hemmings, Daniel J. Pizappi, Steve Weiner, Michael Shou-Yung Shum, Rachel Nagelberg, Marianne Villanueva, Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Gerard Sarnat, Nels Hanson, Laura Bernstein-Machlay, Kent Monroe, Mara Naselli, and Nicola Waldron with cover art by Padma Prasad.
Thanks to Dennis Cooper, my story “Ursula’s Curse” (originally published in The Coming Envelope #9) is up at Dazed Digital as part of their summer long #dazedstates series on American fiction. There’s also an interview with DC and great work by Joyelle McSweeney, Darby Larson, and Frank Hinton.
Dennis Cooper, the punk pioneer of the written word and Visionaries collaborator, brings his transgressive spirit to Dazed today. There’s an interview with the man himself – “America’s most dangerous writer” – as well as his curated selection of other writers who go against the grain: including Eugene Lim, Frank Hinton and Joyelle McSweeney with her Oscar Pistorius opera (no, really).
Eugene Lim. Just take it from us when we say: remember that name. The writer’s got countless contributions to anthologies and chapbooks, as well as two novels – Fog & Car and last year’s acclaimed The Strangers – under his belt. What links everything penned by the Brooklynite, however, is their sense of adventure: and not the kind of adventure, as his short story for Dazed would inititally (incorrectly) suggest, that connotes a rollicking science-fiction adventure to the stars and back. It’s best, with Lim, to instead expect the unexpected. Read our online exclusive, “Ursula’s Curse” – taken from the novel that Lim is currently working on – to discover a loosely poetic prose that seems to come from another time altogether. And, in true Cooper tradition, that’s looking forward – not back.
Dennis Cooper: “Eugene Lim is amazing because he’s really adventurous with form and style in this way that I really like, and it’s so refined. It’s so hard to break apart fiction and do something really unusual with it, and to do it so gracefully. Eugene seems to be able to use form in a really exciting way, but he can also just continually make it beautiful. I mean, it’s very poetic; it’s just lovely. He’s a very good writer. I think he’s really special.”
Read the story here, illustrated with fantastic non-photoshopped flight by artist Li Wei.
Just received thanks to Malcolm Sutton the latest issue of THE COMING ENVELOPE. I’ve work in it along with Kilby Smith-McGregor, S. D. Chrostowska, Thomas Phillips and Jonathan Pappo. My bit, called “Ursula’s Curse,” is an excerpt of a novel-in-slow-progress in which intergalactic arena combat is imminent and a painter writes the following on her works:
This painting cannot be bought or sold for more than the total wages of three months full-time employment at the minimum wage as determined by the state of New York. If this painting should be sold for greater than this amount, may both the buyer and seller be considered shit by the entire world and by themselves, and may they spend the afterlife sad and angry and hungry and hopeless as poverty makes.
TWINS AND POP STARS
with Tom Cho, Eugene Lim
Thursday, April 17, 2014 7:00pm
Asian American Writers’ Workshop
112 W 27th Street, 6th floor
New York, NY
Meet a grandma named Bruce, an occasional Godzilla, and Whitney Houston’s bodyguard/lover. Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing was published to acclaim in Australia and shortlisted for multiple literary awards—including the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book—and has been studied at universities in Canada, Australia, UK, Switzerland and Japan. It is finally being released in the U.S. Eugene Lim will join him on stage to read from his book The Strangers, an experimental novel on twins, relationships, and film, which author Lydia Davis called “so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing.
“For this reader, much of the romance of American fiction seems faded until one reads a novel like The Strangers. As with some of the more interesting 20th century sentence-makers, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Tomasso Landolfi, Robert Walser, or, closer to home, Gilbert Sorrentino and Roberto Bolaño, right from the start of The Strangers, Lim’s characters run away from the writer, get lost, and hide within the writing.”
Read the review here.
THE STRANGERS breaks into the fiction bestseller list at SPD. Why not buy a few copies to paper the den? It makes the perfect gift for that guy or gal who has some things.
by distant association i once knew a woman from a mildly war-torn place who in the decades before 9/11 dabbled in terrorism (as maybe an american youth dabbles with heroin) and who would romanticize it by defining it as the ‘disruption of everyday life.’ which, as a definition, is one that disguises such a tactic’s usual impotence and belies its callous destruction. less revolutionary (perhaps; probably), art seems a better fit for the definition — the disruption of everyday life.
hanshan, from whose name hoevenaar partly takes his book’s title, was a chan buddhist monk and poet who rigorously lived and made his art through a paradoxically opposed truism formulated by his rough contemporary nanquan puyuan: ‘everyday mind is the way.’
(the other half of hoevenaar’s title comes from robert smithson, who had his own definition: You must travel at random, like the first Mayans; you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art.)
a creator of expectation defiances in series, jeremy hoevenaar’s poetry holds, line to line and moment to moment, countless bait-and-switches, feints, legerdemain and outright magic. but while a few of these moves one may have seen before, his poetry also pulses and maintains a complex and relatively pure integrity, i.e. stays open. or, as anselm berrigan states it in the afterword: “This is not a wholly unknown strategy for handling time in poetry, but Hoevenaar is never smug about what he’s doing, and what he’s doing — tonally and rhetorically — is recording a succession of language hits without giving up his condition as open bundle of nerve endings not completely sure how to be built for this world.”
dug it intensely.
excerpts here. purchase it from the publisher here.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014 at 7PM
126A Front Street
Brooklyn,NY,11201
Please join us for the inaugural reading in our new human brain confetti series, VANJA AND THE PANTHER.
The reading will feature the frabjous AMANDA DAVIDSON & supercallifragilistic EUGENE LIM!
Amanda Davidson writes, teaches, and makes performances. She is the author of Apprenticeship (New Herring Press, 2013), a fiction chapbook. Writing, reviews, and author interviews have appeared in the Encyclopedia Project, eMusic, the City Lights Bookstore Blog, and elsewhere. She is at work on a performance novel about the mystic Swedenborg. Visit www.partedinthemiddle.wordpress.com.
Eugene Lim is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press. His fiction has appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly, EXPLORINGfictions, The Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. He is the author of the novels Fog & Car (2008, Ellipsis Press) and The Strangers (brand new, Black Square Editions). He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Queens, NY. www.eugenelim.com.
Come early! Stay late! Hark to the bridge as it groans its metal music above! Support writers! Fictive movements! Make your life better! Hear everything!
https://www.facebook.com/events/379936948808739/
Every year I check out Dennis Cooper’s best-of list. Today, tiny bits of my brain combustified when I saw THE STRANGERS was mentioned there. Good company too. Check it out:
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2013/12/mine-for-yours-my-favorite-fiction.html
Over at The Quarterly Conversation the dashing poet/translator/knot maker Ian Dreiblatt puts up his favorite reads of 2013. Here’s what he writes about Fog & Car:
A lot of steam is wasted in literary criticism on parsing the opposition of “experimental” writing to “realism.” Fog And Car is profoundly both, and each in its best sense. It’s experimental in how the book, willful as water and superbly attentive, creates its own unfamiliar shape in response to the minute exigencies of language. At the same time, it produces a deep realism in its faithfulness to the feeling of being a person. He has the tempo, breath, & tonal sense of a great musician. I’m dying to read his second, The Strangers, just out from Black Square Editions.
Read the whole list here: http://conversationalreading.com/tqc-favorite-reads-of-2013-ian-dreiblatt/
Pick up a copy of Fog & Car from SPD or Amazon.
Thanks to David Gutowski at largeheartedboy.com, here’s some musical companionship for my novel THE STRANGERS.
Why not pick up a baker’s dozen of the book to plant in libraries and bus stops? …It should be available on Amazon in a few days, but please consider buying it from SPD or the publisher’s store at Hyperallergic.
http://store.hyperallergic.com/products/the-strangers-eugene-lim
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780986005022/the-strangers.aspx
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Eugene Lim’s The Strangers is a fascinating novel rich in language, both fascinating and surprising.
Read and listen to the whole playlist here:
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/12/book_notes_euge_1.html
Read and listen to the whole playlist here:
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/12/book_notes_euge_1.html
“In his second novel, Lim (Fog & Car) weaves a fantastical tapestry of the bizarre lives of various sets of twins slipping seamlessly into and out of one another’s awareness…These layered narratives take on a critical mass with each iteration and repetition, as the novel examines the very act of storytelling… in gorgeous language alternately athletic or sprawling, Lim’s whip-smart novel offers revisionist histories that keep readers hungry for the heart of a narrative, for echoes that hold truths.“
Read the entire review here.
The Impossible, The Parallel, The Intimate: A Conversation with Eugene Lim
Eugene Lim’s novels tread the line between the hypnotically familiar and the surreptitiously terrifying. His latest novel, The Strangers, follows multiple sets of twins through landscapes alternately recognizable and surreal. Underground film scenes, stand-up comedy, shipborne communities, and totalitarian states all appear, and yet the entire work remains even-tempered and cohesive. As the publisher of Ellipsis Press, Lim has ushered books from the likes of Norman Lock and Eugene Marten into the world. As an admirer of both The Strangers and his earlier novel Fog & Car, I was curious to learn more about Lim’s process, and so we checked in earlier this month via email…
Read the interview here: http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2013/10/23/the-impossible-the-parallel-the-intimate-a-conversation-with-eugene-lim/
Details for this free block party slash kid-friendly book fest here: http://pageturnerfest.org/
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Roulette (509 Atlantic Ave New York, NY 11217) and the YWCA in Downtown Brooklyn.
Eugene Lim, Sergio De La Pava, Ira Silverberg, Miguel Syjuco
EXPERIMENTAL IDENTITIES
12PM – 1PM | Roulette Downstairs Gallery
Three writers read metafictional, adventurous books whose prose is as experimental and fractured as their main characters’ identities. Brooklyn Public Defender Sergio de la Pava originally published his “unapologetically maximalist” novel A Naked Singularity (Slate), a novel seemingly too ambitious and eclectic for mainstream publishing. The book was picked up by the University of Chicago, won a PEN Literary Award, and earned comparisons to Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Melville. The 678-page hysterical tome follows a public defender who’s the child of Colombian immigrants, as he takes readers through a tour of crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight. What would happen if you threw 150 years of the Philippines into the blender with Oscar Wao and Tristram Shandy? Possibly something like Miguel Syjuco’s Man Asian Award-winning novel Illustrado, which combines poetry, reviews, interviews, polemics, unreliable narration, and a main character whose name is—surprise, surprise—Miguel Syjuco. Eugene Lim’s layered, pixelated novel The Strangerscollects a “literary cabinet of curiosities,” in the words of The Paris Review, including a young man vandalizing the posters of a paranoid nation, the search for the perfect T-shirt, and the missing person’s bureau of a giant cruise ship. Moderated by Ira Silverberg, former Editor-in-Chief of Grove Atlantic and NEA Literature Director.
Along with Colin Winnette, Karolina Waclawiak, Jen Gann and D. Foy, I’ll be reading on Tuesday 9/17 as part of an event put together by the dapper folks at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. The reading will take place at Book Thug Nation (100 North 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY) and begin at 7:00 p.m. Facebook RSVP here.
