An essay about my writing in the Cleveland Review of Books

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“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?”

Many thanks to Shinjini Dey. Read their essay, “The Haunting Presence of a Network: On Eugene Lim,” at the Cleveland Review of Books.

CHOIR, a new chapbook

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CHOIR is a chapbook I wrote inspired by Sung Tieu’s installation now on display at Amant in Williamsburg.

Many thanks to Wendy’s Subway and Amant for commissioning this work. You can purchase CHOIR here: https://wendyssubway.com/publishing/titles/choir

You can read more about Sung Tieu’s show here: https://www.artforum.com/print/202304/catherine-quan-damman-on-sung-tieu-and-the-art-of-derivative-critique-90275.

You can visit Sung Tieu’s Infra-Spector in Brooklyn, now through September 24, 2023, at Amant.

An excerpt from the novel-in-slow-progress in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #70

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“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.


SEARCH HISTORY has won a 2023 Book Award from Association of Asian American Studies!

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SEARCH HISTORY wins a 2023 Book Award from Association of Asian American Studies!

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.”

Redacted Gratitude Lists from the Second Year of the Plague

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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

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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…
________________

Read the rest here: https://www.128lit.org/eugene-lim

Lisa Hsiao Chen’s ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING out now!

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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.

from ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING by Lisa Chen.

“beguiling and brilliant” -Viet Thanh Nguyen

“fiercely honest, and exhilarating” -Claire Messud

_______________________

Join us in celebrating this incredible book’s publication next week on April 21 at 7:30PM. IN PERSON! This will be at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. Info here: https://www.greenlightbookstore.com/event/lisa-hsiao-chen-eugene-lim
[VIRTUAL] In Conversation: Lisa Hsiao Chen and Anelise Chen
Also, tonight, at 7PM, Lisa will be speaking with Anelise Chen at AAWW. Info here: https://aaww.org/curation/virtual-in-conversation-lisa-hsiao-chen-and-anelise-chen/


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.

i get to be on my favorite podcast, Time To Say Goodbye !

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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.

https://goodbye.substack.com/p/book-time-with-eugene-lim?utm_source=url

Some more reviews for Search History

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“[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 DEATH OF A CHARACTER by david ohle

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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!

Buy the book from Stalking Horse Press.

Interview with David Ohle by JA Tyler in Bomb magazine from 2014.

Gabe Hudson on The Age of Sinatra in the Village Voice, from 2004.

Interview with David Ohle about William Burroughs from 2007.

More links and info at David Ohle day, presented at Dennis Cooper’s blog.

Search History Launch with Gina Apostol

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From October 5, 2021. I had the great privilege of launching Search History via AAWW and with the fearless and wonderful Gina Apostol.

>>”This October, we celebrated Eugene Lim‘s highly anticipated new book, Search History. With the use of brilliant prose, this uniquely inventive novel explores American culture, technology, artmaking, and storytelling through the eyes of a grieving narrator. Eugene was joined in conversation by writer Gina Apostol.”

Search History reviewed in The Saturday Paper

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“The construction of self and identity and the transformative nature of art underpin a work that, despite being clothed in clever satire and searing humour, is a tender exploration of how we love and what we consequently risk losing, of death and its aftermath, grief.”

Read the whole review here.

Ten Questions for Eugene Lim | Poets & Writers

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“This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Eugene Lim, whose latest novel, Search History, is out today from Coffee House Press…. Often simultaneously hilarious and devastating, Search History is an adventure story that offers profound insight into grief and grieving in the contemporary era…”

>Q: What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
>A: I remember thinking the title would be bad for SEO. 

Read the full ten-question interview here: https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_eugene_lim

An elegant review of Search History by Paul Di Filippo in the Washington Post

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[T]hese stories have shattered preconceived notions about novels and recast the bits into fresh forms…This bricolage surprisingly coheres by the novel’s end into an authentic expression of a mind striving to comprehend the inexplicable cruelties of the universe and humanity’s most proper response… Fans of Haruki Murakami’s melancholy, oneiric tales will also delight in Lim’s assault upon consensus reality. He encourages the reader to “stop making sense,” in the Talking Heads manner, and experience the universe as a magical tapestry of events whose overall pattern is perceivable only by God — or maybe after one’s own death.

—Paul Di Fillipo, Washington Post

i was very happy to receive this review in the Washington Post by Paul Di Filippo. it was a very gratifying review for me as it explicitly states some of my conceptual hopes and furthermore laid them out in a personal, insightful, and elegant style. at times it felt like a duet, so seen and well represented i felt. a sincere thanks to Paul Di Filippo.

[as an aside, the review does make a small and unimportant error by misnaming one of the characters as Muriel. (it’s truly not an important detail for a reader’s experience — but why it isn’t important is kinda important. (characters are a technology that evaporate within a greater and wider sense of personhood, might be brief summary of the/my argument.) but, to the reviewer’s credit, having an unnamed narrator is always confusing (and this one might have more than one). but, to clarify: the unnamed character that goes on the global hunt with Donna Winters for the AI/dog (in my non-authoritative authorial mind) is not Muriel.]

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