Author name: eugene

An excerpt from THE STRANGERS in Secret Behavior

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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

 

Some new fiction in YOUR IMPOSSIBLE VOICE

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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.

“Ursula’s Curse” now up at Dazed

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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.

flying over venice li wei

 

 

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.

Some fiction in the latest issue of THE COMING ENVELOPE

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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.

I’m reading with Tom Cho at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop on April 17th at 7PM

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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.


Paul Vangelisti reviews THE STRANGERS at Your Impossible Voice

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YIV

“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.

COLD MOUNTAIN MIRROR DISPLACEMENT by jeremy hoevenaar

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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.

Reading 1/22/2014 with Amanda Davidson at Berl’s

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berls poetry shop

Wednesday, January 22, 2014 at 7PM

Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop

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/

 

FOG & CAR named a fave read for 2013

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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.

 

 

Book Notes to THE STRANGERS at largehearted boy

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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.

Stream a playlist of these songs at Spotify.

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

PW has a nice review of THE STRANGERS

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PW

“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.

Interview at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

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The Impossible, The Parallel, The Intimate: A Conversation with Eugene Lim

By  On  · 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/

I’ll be reading at AAWW’s Page Turner fest this Saturday

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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.

A LOVE MADE OUT OF NOTHING & ZOHARA’S JOURNEY by barbara honigmann

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Brassai-Honigmann

two sad, beautiful novellas. a subtle lyricism that reminded sometimes of early handke, sometimes of the edgy desperation portrayed so well by elena ferrante. at yet other times what was brought to mind — even though honigmann here risks sentiment much more — was sebald’s sacred, dry handling of the stories of refugees and immigrants. what stands out however is an emotional and graceful prose that embodies outsider and diaspora life, its various defeats and small, bittersweet triumphs.

A LOVE MADE OUT OF NOTHING tells a story similar to honigmann’s biography. here, an adult daughter of a german jewish father and a bulgarian jewish mother self-exiles herself from east berlin to a lonely paris.
one of the more incredible bits is when she discovers her father’s diary entries from 1946, when he returns to germany. an almost casual description of the situation he then found himself in: “Someone asks us if we’re Italian. They no longer remember what Jews look like” (71)

the second novella ZOHARA’S JOURNEY is more straight-forward, in a way, and becomes, by its end, a semi-adventure story (before a final collapse). another great portrait, it speaks of a sephardic jewish refugee from algeria living in france with her six kids — a woman cruelly trapped by fate and her crooked, confidence-man husband.

i hope there’s more of her soon in english.

pick it up from the publisher or at your library or at an indie bookstore near you.

honigmann

ODES & fragments by Alan Davies

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ODESFRAGMENTS-709x1024

 

the latest book from ellipsis press is by alan davies. more info plus an excerpt here.

ODES & fragments by Alan Davies presents a substantial collection of recent poetry, including odes and fragments as well as modes above and beyond. Ranging in length from a few words to twenty-plus pages, these poems vary widely, exploring love and fellowship, war and adversity, beginnings and endings (and the ongoing), instances of thought, feelings that flutter then fail, moments of apprehension (both senses), and our confrontation with the irretrievable.

 

Praise for Alan Davies

The kind of skill with handling language that can’t be rushed or faked, and that I only hear in the work of writers who have really practiced for a long time.
—Craig Dworkin

Alan Davies’s poems have such great sound and are open and situated and fearless in their response to what happens internally and in the big often ugly outside. A startling writer and very precise on whatever path he sets for himself.
—Carla Harryman

Davies hasn’t been publishing a lot in recent years & to see this much work at once, this much first-rate work, is completely bracing. He hasn’t lost a step & is every bit as uncompromising as ever. This actually can make Davies a difficult read at times, but it never is complexity just for the sake of showing off. He continues to be the Diogenes of the New York langpo scene.
—Ron Silliman

Davies’s belief in radical self-reflexivity has led him, in the course of his writing career, from a virtually opaque formalism to a continuity of text and life-world that is anything but aesthetic construction.
—Barrett Watten

[Davies] has suggested to me ways of thinking about connective possibility, ways through which ‘no one is absent anymore’…. how writing and reading matters, not just for its comforts or its eloquent aesthetics, but for the way it can take us through comfort and aesthetics into relations with others, for the way it can model thinking.
— Juliana Spahr

ALAN DAVIES IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE POET WHO HAS EVER HAD SEX. The rest of them are virgins, which, I know, is weird — I don’t know how to explain it, it’s just a historical fact. But because of this, Davies’s work stands out as addressing an aspect of life, of reality, and of vitality that other writers might not have had the experience to write about.
—Steve Zultanski 

read an excerpt here.

buy it directly from ellipsis press or through spd or amazon.

Review of THE STRANGERS in the Review of Contemporary Fiction

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RCF32 3

Norman Lock writes about The Strangers in the latest issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction:

 

To place the storytelling act at the center of a novel is a risky strategy: the stories must fascinate. Lim’s stories do (except those few that he deliberately effaces as if to give a graphic representation of self-erasure). They have the exoticism, emotional authenticity, and intellectual depth to ensure that the reader will be enthralled. Lim’s knowledge of economic theory, political science, art history and practice, the minutiae and mechanisms of businesses large and small is sweeping. His verbal constructions exhibit lyrical and playful strains, indignation and sensuality, and a genuinely hip, idiomatic flair. Lim’s ambition to relate “grand narratives”—to tessellate them within a mysterious, comprehensive verbal construction and, in so doing, to recreate in his fictional universe the entire world and its archetypical figures—makes his novel an uncommon artifact. The Strangers in its complex self-referential, multi-layered structure, anecdotal mass, and restless inventiveness demands and rewards more than one reading.

Read the whole review here.

 

VAULT by david rose

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vault

convincing and moving portrayals of quiet, selfless valor told with a great textured, muscular writing:

“Towns flattened for miles, those civilians unable to flee living as troglodytes in cellars half-flooded with rain and sewage, making hopscotch forays to find crusts or cabbage leaves in the rubbled gutters” (p. 33).

this novel on the surface is occupied primarily with two physical activities: being a sniper (during the second world war) and racing bicycles. but rose’s beautifully rendered description of these two (at times sinister) occupations make us touch our animal side — and by that we’re uncannily opened up to profound moral and philosophical quandaries.

 davidrose2

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here’s an interview revealing, among other interesting bits, a sebald-related origin story.

pick it up at the library or through the publisher.

A new novel forthcoming from Black Square Editions!

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The Strangers by Eugene Lim

Praise for The Strangers

What an astonishing book! Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication. 
–Harry Mathews

 

THE STRANGERS is like a cabinet of curiosities put together by Georges Perec and Andrei Biely, hilarious and utterly seductive, a sharp commentary on the social and political architecture we cling to at our peril. And yet, while pulling the rug out from under the reader, Eugene Lim’s book is a total pleasure.
–Susan Daitch

 

Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life that it is (fantastically) convincing, Eugene Lim’s THE STRANGERS, with its multiple interwoven strands, reveals one surprising character and relationship after the next, and culminates in a skilfully devised and satisfying resolution. A fascinating and engrossing tale.
–Lydia Davis

Five Fiction Reviews: Dimock, Saer, Murong, Lispector, Mellis

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I reviewed five fiction titles for the latest (and sadly, the last) issue of Harp & Altar: NONE OF THIS IS REAL by Miranda Mellis; A BREATH OF LIFE by Clarice Lispector; LEAVE ME ALONE by Murong Xuecun; SCARS by Juan José Saer; and GEORGE ANDERSON by Peter Dimock.

“None of This Is Real… manages to speak precisely to that helplessness and guilt permeating the simultaneity of the climate-changed, apocalypse-always zeitgeist and the rapturous technowonderful singularity as advertised on your hand-holding device.”

Read the reviews here.

__________________________________

This great issue of Harp & Altar also has: poetry and fiction by Tom Andes, Jessica Baran, Leopoldine Core, Ian Dreiblatt, Matthew Klane, Linnea Ogden, Jennifer Pilch, Michael Rerick, Jason Snyder, Donna Stonecipher, Sally Van Doren, and Tom Whalen; Jesse Lichtenstein on The Arcadia Project; Bianca Stone on Farrah Field; Michael Newton’s gallery reviews; and art by Adam Stolorow.

Interview with Peter Dimock

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An interview I did with Peter Dimock appears in the latest issue of Bookslut.

Peter Dimock’s latest novel George Anderson: Notes for a Love Song in Imperial Time is written as a letter to the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — a lawyer who drafted and signed one of the Bush era’s infamous Torture Memos. While it’s true that a handful of soldiers who participated in the beatings, rape, vicious strappado hangings, and other savage abuses at Abu Ghraib were charged and convicted, the masterminds of the legal reasoning that allowed the torture, now euphemistically branded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” of prisoners-of-war have never been held accountable.

Dimock’s slim fiction rages against this and a host of state sins while also deftly functioning as a sorrowful, secular confession for an entitled race and class. It does this in an altogether unique style, which one reviewer described as coming from a “speaker who may be in some kind of rapture, or who is ironic, or who is mad, or who is all three.” I met the author, a long-serving editor in the New York publishing world, at a restaurant near his home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Both of your books are stylistic gambles. The purpose and direction of that style is not immediately recognizable. We don’t know why you’re making these stylistic choices. In your author’s note you write that the success of your ambition will “rest upon the reader’s response to [your] invention of a form… no matter how estranged or estranging the results may seem at first.” While writing, how aware are you of your gamble? Did it seem like a gamble? And how did you reconcile yourself to this risk?

My experience is the history I have lived through. I was born in 1950. And so I was eighteen in 1968. That’s a moment. I was draftable at the height of the Vietnam War. So I have a particular relationship to that time, like everyone who lived through that period. But I remember being overwhelmed — I still am — by the sense that we don’t have a language adequate to the history we’re actually living. I was brought up and trained — I had all the best education and the best positions from which to assume an intellectual role either as an academic or a literary critic — but always felt I never could actually assume any such role in good faith. I feel strongly that — with the exception of contemporary literature, I’m thinking of Morrison, Marquez, Pynchon, and Bishop — we have not as a culture yet truly grappled with the inadequacy of the language we have available to us for the history we are living. I think we are crippled by this lack of a language.

Read the whole interview here:

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2013_03_019928.php

Upcoming reading on Tuesday, March 5, 2013 @ 7 pm | Double Take IV

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http://apexart.org/events/double-take-4.php

I’ll be reading on Tuesday, March 5th with John Yau, Rick Moody, Tim Davis, Charles Bernstein and Elizabeth Willis. Please come!

 

Double Take IV

Tuesday, March 5: 7 pm

Three pairs of authors write original pieces about shared experiences.

organized by
Albert Mobilio

Featuring:
Rick Moody & Tim Davis on the dinner where they met.
John Yau & Eugene Lim on remembering the Robert Creeley memorial.
Charles Bernstein & Elizabeth Willis on the obvious.

Watch videos from the previous Double Take program.

Charles Bernstein‘s new collection of poems, Recalculating, will be out this Spring from the University of Chicago Press, which also published hisAttack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Davis is an artist, writer, and musician. His photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan, Whitney, Guggenheim, Walker, Hirshhorn, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and many other museums. He is the author of My Life in Policits (Aperture), and The New Antiquity (Damiani). Having written song lyrics for years for the band Cuddle Magic, he is currently at work on his first album of original songs, which will be accompanied by a set of music videos entitled “It’s OK to Hate Yourself.” He teaches Photography at Bard College.

Eugene Lim is an editor at small for Harp & Altar and is founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press. His fiction has appeared in Fence, The Denver Quarterly, EXPLORINGFictions, The Brooklyn Rail, sleepingfish, No Colony and elsewhere. His first novel, Fog & Car, was named a finalist in Blatt Magazine’s 2007 Novel of Novels competition. His second novel The Strangers is forthcoming from Black Square Editions. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives in Queens, NY.

Rick Moody is the author of five novels–including The Ice Story and, most recently, The Four Fingers of Death—three collections of stories, a memoir entitled The Black Veil, and, most recently, a collection of essays On Celestial Music. He is a music columnist at The Rumpus, and he also plays in and writes songs for The Wingdale Community Singers. He teaches at NYU and Yale.

John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists’ books, fiction, and art criticism. Yau has received awards and grants from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, the Academy of American Poets (Lavan Award), The American Poetry Review (Jerome Shestack Award), the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the General Electric Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Elizabeth Willis‘s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan, 2011), won the PEN New England Prize for Poetry and is just out in paperback. Her other books of poetry include Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, and The Human Abstract. She is a 2012-13 Guggenheim fellow. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing. His work has appeared in Harper’s,Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Open City, and Tin House. Books of poetry include Bendable Siege, The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, andTouch Wood. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College and is an editor of Bookforum.

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New short story by Tom Whalen called “The Exam”

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Take the test!

Calling all PhD students, English professors, the slackjawed, public-library-lurkers, the learned and the unlearned: here’s a high-stakes entrance examination for your exexexmatriculation. Take “The Exam” by Tom Whalen in the Brooklyn Rail.

In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” regarding the comparison of the rolling of the balls in the game of nine-pins to “rumbling peals of thunder,” why is it impossible to state definitively which comes first, the nine-pins or nature?  Offer three refutations to Sedgwick’s (“homosexual panic”) and Morrison’s (Afro-centric) remarks on “The Beast in the Jungle.”  How often did your parent(s), guardian(s), institution(s) read aloud to you before the age of five? three? one?  On a scale of one to ten, with one being “calm” and ten “psychotic,” how nervous are you?  Do you see the exam as a challenge or a threat, considering that if you do not pass, you will not be allowed to hold a teaching position in this country?  Compare your anxiety to that of two of the following: Ichabod Crane, Young Goodman Brown, the narrator of “The Black Cat.”  Hurry.  The exam has barely begun, and already you’re falling behind.  Perhaps the consequences of your failing are even more severe than you’ve imagined.

Read the rest of “The Exam” in

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Tom Whalen’s novel THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS is available now directly from Ellipsis Press, from Small Press Distribution, and from Amazon.

Whalen will read at Unnameable bookstore on Thursday March 21, 2013.

THE PRESIDENT IN HER TOWERS by Tom Whalen

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I’m very proud to have worked on this book, the latest Ellipsis Press title. Tom Whalen has written an incredibly beautiful and surprising novel, a sly allegory about power and bureaucracy that has a narrator with that saintly and cuckoo mix to whom Jakob von Gunten might be close cousin.

“The President in Her Towers is a deft, daft satire of bureaucracy, paranoia, professional envy, megalomania, the madness of specialization and the absence of transparency as they infect the university and, in general, our institutionalized existence.  But Tom Whalen’s exuberant, intelligent, and wryly allusive fiction is also an example – rare in our deadly serious literature – of the marvelous: a headlong adventure in storytelling, reminding us that writing needs no other justification than the esprit of a writer obedient to a high manic imagination.  To read Whalen’s book is a pleasure well beyond the ordinary; it is, in fact, to bear witness to a prodigious act of creation. ” —Norman Lock

Some more info, including an excerpt, here.

Available for order from SPD or from Ellipsis Press or from Amazon.

If you’re a reviewer and want an reader’s copy, please email me at: eugene at ellipsispress.com.

An excerpt from THE STRANGERS

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I’m happy to have a piece of fiction in the latest issue of The Brooklyn Rail. “Spooky Action at a Distance” is excerpted from a forthcoming novel called THE STRANGERS (Black Square Editions) about several sets of odd twins. Here’s how it starts:

It’s when the cop is punching my face that I make the decision. I decide to go look for my sister. My whole life I’d indulged in a stupid thrill, a very risky habit. In the middle of the night I’d sneak through the town and deface posters of the beloved president. Sometimes just a mustache over his beloved pudgy face. I kept it scatological or primitive. For fifteen years I’d done this and never got caught.

The cop is working me over pretty good. I’ve never taken a punch before. I worry about my brain and whether he’ll bust something inside me and I’ll die slowly as things that aren’t supposed to meet mix inside my sloshy guts. I’m a wet animal and I’m weeping like a child and very ashamed that I am and I’m scared.

Read the rest.

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