fiction in the Portland Review
I have some fiction in the latest Portland Review, available here.
Convex mirror in a self-portrait
flash fiction published in the UK’s Roman Road Journal.
which, come to think of it, is revisiting this yesteryear blurt.
i’m reading this Sunday at KGB with Hannah Lillith Assadi, Joni Murphy, and Anne K. Yoder
March 11 : 7PM
Wish Fullfillment: Sunday Night Fiction at KGB.
KGB Bar
85 E 4th St, New York, New York 10003
THE NAMEABLE: on experimental writing
In Oct 2016 I gave a talk at Naropa on experimental writing defined as an integral / lower limit WCW / upper limit Audre Lorde. An essay based on it just published in their Something-on-Paper #5.
BLOOD FABLE by Oisín Curran
wah! i hadn’t realized BLOOD FABLE was already out. such a blur these past few months have been that somehow i missed its release. well no matter, but this is a singular portrait of childhood by the great Oisín Curran, author of the fantastic MOPUS. here’s what i wrote about Blood Fable:
This careful and loving rendering of a child’s mind proves that acts of storytelling were once not so much vehicles for escape but instead crucial rehearsals for being. A remembrance of lost time—or maybe, to reference its Buddhist undergirding, an alaya-vijnana, a storehouse consciousness—Curran’s vision of boyhood is perfect in details and sublimely moving. Blood Fable is a magnificent double take, which—like a bistable optical illusion (duck or rabbit?) —allows two universes to coexist. A rapturous adventure tale where the very essence of adventure is subverted so that fantasy and reality conflate; this is done not for temporary trickery but to deepen our comprehension of the real.
from the great canadian press: Bookthug
RED CLOCKS by Leni Zumas
there’s so much smart, non-sentimental wisdom in this, so much ferocious heart — it provided me with actual honest-to-gaia hope. i love this book.
¶
(also the more everyone loves a book, it puts you off and you don’t want to read it, right? should you be that contrarian of my own likeness, better you read this book early so you can run point and be scene not herd. pubdate: 1/16/2018)
¶
anthem without manipulative soar, just a hummable unforgettable tune you believe in. a feminism that’s so fundamental and organic its ambient teaching happens by osmosis, has an easy touch (except those instances which explode with perfect articulation). within its setting and near-future, there’s also a subtle abstraction so that its world hovers above, just a bit more pure than the real, so its model of reality allows us a more crystal insight into ourselves. 2018 flagship.
_______________
“Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Her tale feels part Melvillian, part Lydia Davis, part Octavia Butler—but really Zumas’s vision is entirely her own. RED CLOCKS is funny, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now.” —Maggie Nelson
Dear Cyborgs one of Vol 1 Brooklyn’s Favorites of 2017
“Eugene Lim’s third novel is about many things, including protest movements, pulp heroes, the nature of (and need for) storytelling, and the frustrations of history. It’s like nothing else you’ll read this year: a bold, thought-provoking novel that unfolds in unpredictable ways.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
DEAR CYBORGS selected for BOMB Magazine’s year-end roundup
Chris Kraus and Tobias Carroll both mention DEAR CYBORGS in BOMB Magazine’s year-end roundup. Chris Kraus writes:
Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals) is a novel of the future. It’s surprising, and—while giving despair its full measure—it’s surprisingly inspiring. A Bolano-esque labyrinth of shaggy dog stories flow through the narrator, describing the existential and physical conditions of a present in which it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but it’s written in calm and succinct, elegant prose. Lim nails the amnesia of sensory overload perfectly. Attending a cultural event, the narrator and friends are enthralled by Jonas Mekas’ chilling meditation on history and mortality but when they repair to a bar and watch a reality TV show on screen, his words evaporate.
see the rest of the selections here.
Interviewed on Lumpen Radio’s “Eye 94”
out of chicago, Lumpen Radio (105.5 FM WLPN) has a books and literature program called Eye 94. this year’s past shows have included interviews with Open Letters publisher chad post and translator charlotte mandell. their full archives are here.
i was happy — though a little nervous — to be interviewed live this past sunday by the trio of gentlemenly hosts: jeremy kitchen, mike sack, and jamie trecker. you can listen to the interview through the widget above or here.
DEAR CYBORGS among great company as one of The Brooklyn Rail’s best books of 2017.
DEAR CYBORGS among great company as one of The Brooklyn Rail’s best books of 2017. Thanks to Books Editor, Joseph Salvatore.
Dear Cyborgs listed on Dennis Cooper’s “Mine for yours” 2017 round-up list
Dennis Cooper’s “Mine for yours” is a most necessary annual starmap of novels, poetry, music and movies. and this year he includes DEAR CYBORGS(!) along with excellent work by Renee Gladman, Gary Lutz, Lidia Yuknavitch, Nathaniel Mackey, Jen George, Eileen Myles, Michael Seidlinger, Jarett Kobek, and many great others.
his blog in general is worth following. the most recent entry, for instance, is an epic collection of “cutaway” illustrations, from which this “kiss” is but one example of things once seen not unseeable.
Tobias Carroll interviews me at The Scofield
i’m interviewed and have a box over my head in the latest issue of The Scofield, the theme of which is : Kōbō Abe & Home. a big thanks (again!) to Tobias Carroll.
In Issue 3.1, read @TobiasCarroll‘s wonderful conversation with author @lim_eugene regarding his book Dear Cyborgs. Download free now: https://t.co/4et5F1bbRT pic.twitter.com/A5nsHY89Dj
— The Scofield (@TheScofieldMag) December 6, 2017
Year in Reading up at The Millions
“Our current condition of ambient despair gets an excellent portraiture in Evelyn Hampton’s The Aleatory Abyss. It’s an obscure book about being obscure—or at least it is a book about occupying forgotten interstitial spaces and about being of and among technological detritus. In Hampton’s world we live our lives not in streets, schools, libraries, parks, or other public commons but online and in Barnes & Nobles, Starbucks, malls, parking lots, and other privatized spaces; that is, Hampton shows us a familiar world. Personhood and agency here in the Anthropocene are moribund concepts, if not already vestigial, and great creatures called multinationals and state actors roam the terrain while we endure like plankton or parasites below and beside their decisions. This short book also pays homage to and is haunted by Hampton’s friend, the activist and writer Mark Baumer, who died in the middle of a mythic project that found him walking barefoot across America. Both artists are turned helplessly into elegists. Baumer’s work was part durational performance piece, part environmental fundraiser, part quixotic publicity stunt, and part personal protest. He kept record of his walk through a series of videos and blog posts, many of them heartbreakingly prescient, especially his final video, posted the day after the Trump inauguration, the day he died when struck by an SUV. Hampton’s work transmutes Baumer’s extroverted dissent, his syncopated poetic voice, and his manic video edits into its twinned flip: an equally clear-eyed but introverted analysis, a quieter but no less fierce objection. The Aleatory Abyss is a beautiful work, and profits from sales will go to the charity Mark Baumer was walking for: the FANG collective…”
Read the rest at: https://themillions.com/2017/12/year-reading-eugene-lim.html
Revisiting that which can’t be revisited: Merce Cunningham
Merce Cunningham sits very high in my personal pantheon. In 2011 we got tickets to his company’s final performances. These were big, moving nights for us — even as I’ve always found it hard to describe what is so emotionally moving about his work. I wrestled with this and wrote about it for the Paris Review’s “Revisited” series.
…So even prior to (or outside of) the physical dance, there was already a parallel conceptual-art project that was an intense durational-performance work, an almost literal dance with death, a mourning ritual, an explosion of life within death, and an enlightened embracing and letting go of time all at once.
Read the piece here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/22/merce-cunninghams-posthumous-legacy-plan/
LYNN CRAWFORD’S SHANKUS & KITTO
Lynn Crawford’s new novel is an inside-out family epic where, instead of the usual sweep of generational time, we are given a perspective that allows us to see familial heartbreaks as a telescoping and ever repeating fractal… Crawford is an accurate, sometimes mordant, more often earnest, observer of a new normal… Crawford’s voices capture a particular type of everyday speech. William Carlos Williams, arguing for an American (immigrant) context said that his work derived from “the mouths of Polish mothers.” By writing in a poetry of vernacular, Lynn Crawford has similarly and bravely gone against the grain and in doing so has slyly re-constructed the family epic.
read the rest of the review here: http://thefanzine.com/on-lynn-crawfords-shankus-kitto-a-saga/
but the book here.
Jeremy Hoevenaar’s Insolvency, Insolvency!
Jeremy Hoevenaar’s Insolvency, Insolvency! is now available for pre-order. Here’s my blurb for it:
Making a precise and brilliant artwork out of the transaction-speak of the internet and the baked-in indeterminacy of theory talk, Hoevenaar’s poems have the circuitry and compressed connection you’ll find once you scalpel out the microchip they’ll soon implant in your skull. These are multisyllabic bars of actuarial nerdrap, featuring an exacting stutter-rhythm, and with a fragment-studded and polished lyric. Want to know what our insolvent and complicit-making world looks like from the inside out? Follow Insolvency, Insolvency!’s links.
more info here: https://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=593
profile in the Village Voice
thanks to Ross Barkan.
[and additional thanks for the illustration to Mich Yeh. you can find her work here, here, and here.]
There’s a point in Eugene Lim’s slim, haunting new novel, Dear Cyborgs, where the cyborgs finally reveal themselves. They are not, it turns out, cybernetic crime-fighters or machine killers with human hearts and laser blaster hands.
“When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us,” Lim writes, laying bare what lies at the crux of his project, an unusual book now drawing the sorts of critical accolades that should vault him into the first rank of American writers. The New Yorker and New York magazine were laudatory. Jonathan Lethem said the novel blew him away.
read the rest here: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/15/how-eugene-lims-dear-cyborgs-explores-life-death-and-asian-identity/
New work called “Returning to the Problem” up at the Brooklyn Rail
I’ve some new work (an essay-poem-fiction smoosh) just up at the Brooklyn Rail. With great thanks to Donald Breckenridge.
It’s not true I didn’t remember. I did remember some things. I remembered the city. Big avenues and parks and terminals and plazas. Crowds going to and from work. People strolling. A Chinese writer I’d read said it’s impossible to say if a person is good or bad when they’re walking the street. They may be coming from evil or good, or on their way to committing evil or good, but in their moment of walking they are neither. Thus they are most human at that moment. Blankly human. The Chinese writer had been in prison when he wrote that.
Read the rest at http://brooklynrail.org/2017/07/fiction/Returning-to-the-Problem
Christian Lorentzen in New York Magazine
Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is a novel of ideas, small, elegant ideas about art and protest, and one of the most striking literary works to emerge from the Occupy movement . . . The possible futility, complicity, and co-optation of protest are the ideas Dear Cyborgs circles around without ever giving up on the idea that resistance is essential . . . I had expected the decade’s wave of protests to yield a raft of conventional social novels—some earnest, some satirical, perhaps not a few reactionary—but in Dear Cyborgs Lim has delivered something far more idiosyncratic, intricate, and useful: a novel that resists and subverts conventions at every turn.
Christian Lorentzen in New York Magazine
Interview at Kartika Review
Thanks to Paul Lai for this interview in the latest issue of the Karikta Review.
Eugene Lim is a singular voice in contemporary American literature—read one of his novels, and you’ll never forget the stories, characters, and atmosphere he evokes in his quasi-dreamlike narratives. His first novel Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008) traces the diverging and converging paths of a recently divorced couple. The man settles into a quiet life in a small town while the woman starts anew in New York City, and the people who enter their post-marriage lives are not always as disconnected from their married lives as they may seem. In his second novel, The Strangers (Black Square Press, 2013), a larger cast of characters centers around various twins separated by geographical distance as well as starkly different worlds. His third novel, Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), is framed by the story of childhood friends who re-encounter each other later in life, and the stories within this frame consider spies, superheroes, and very pointed commentaries on protest and art. In all three novels, Lim explores resonances, coincidences, and links between characters that bring up questions of fate or otherworldly design. He carries over names between novels as well, so even though the novels seem to concern very different characters and worlds, there is a semblance of continuity that lingers.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Lim’s novels is that the worlds he creates seem at once generic (with a timeless, universal quality) while also strongly rooted in contemporary political concerns. In his latest novel, Dear Cyborgs, for instance, the characters reference South Korean activist Kim Jin-suk who famously spent a year on top of a construction crane; Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden; the Occupy movement in the United States; and the large scale anti-war protests during the build-up to and start of the second Iraq/Gulf War. Lim also includes Asian American characters and narrators regularly in his novels though the plots and themes generally engage obliquely, maybe allusively, with more traditional narratives of racialization. Overall, at least for me as a reader, Lim’s novels also present a haunting atmosphere that treads on possible supernatural elements without tipping over into outright horror or fantasy. We are excited to talk to the author about his writing and working life in the interview that follows…
Interview at The Millions
Thanks to Evan Allgood for this interview.
Eugene Lim will not choose between superheroes and soliloquies. His new novel, Dear Cyborgs, shifts between quick bursts of pulpy action and long philosophical monologues. Characters kidnap, shoot, and poison one other, then weigh the merits of protest and relay brushes with gentrification. Capitalism looms over the book like one of Marvel’s Sentinels — inescapable, maybe indestructible. Low art sits next to high, smudging the hierarchy. The term “thoughtful dystopian romp” comes to mind. The year or universe is hazy, but we can make out some of our less fine hours, our targeted ads. Two worlds slide together and a third comes into focus. Is this how people write in the future?
Lim and I exchanged emails about the value of protest, the act of reading as resistance, and the death and rebirth of the novel.
Read the interview at The Millions.
Interview on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show
“Eugene Lim joins us to discuss his novel Dear Cyborgs. The novel begins in a small Midwestern town, with two Asian American boys who become friends over their mutual love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternate/future universe, Lim tells the story of detective Frank Exit, who is trailing a cultural terrorist named Ms. Mistleto, and their chase around the world.”
Listen to the interview here: http://www.wnyc.org/story/eugene-lim/
Dear Cyborgs gets the Double Take treatment at Electric Lit
spoilers contained, should you believe in such, in these smart, honest (double) takes of DEAR CYBORGS. thank to Jw McCormack and Rosiė Clàrke.
here’s my favorite bit:
“I was certainly misled by the superhero element!”
& also:
“In a way, it’s the most lucid book I’ve read lately. All the books I’ve related to lately have basically brought up the question(s) — what are we doing here? What are we party to? What is desirable? What is apt, given that the correct socio-political view is the horrified, baffled, fearful, woke one?”
& also:
“I think to write a book about immigrant experience that isn’t about immigrant experience, about superheroes that skews their whole purpose, and about capitalism and resistance that doesn’t succumb to bright-eyed idealism or weary cynicism is quite an achievement.”
read the rest here.
Hua Hsu in The New Yorker
“I was a few pages from the end of Eugene Lim’s wondrous new novel, DEAR CYBORGS, when I flipped back to the beginning and started again… His writing is confident and tranquil; he has a knack for making everyday life seem strange—or, in the case of DEAR CYBORGS, for making revolution seem like the most natural thing possible. His writing is transfixing from page to page, filled with digressive meditations on small talk and social protest, superheroes, terrorism, the art world, and the status of being marginal… there’s an intoxicating, whimsical energy on every page.”
Read the rest of Hua Hsu’s review in the New Yorker.
American classics that influenced Dear Cyborgs, mostly in pairs
Library of America’s series of guest posts by contemporary American writers returns with the following contribution from Eugene Lim, whose novel Dear Cyborgs has just been published by FSG Originals.
In a concise 176 pages, Dear Cyborgs interweaves two narratives: one about two isolated Asian American boys in the Midwest who bond over a mutual love of comics, and the other about a group of disaffected superheroes pondering resistance strategies in the era of late capitalism.
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, who just edited the anthology Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z for Library of America, is already a vocal fan of the novel, telling The Chicago Review of Books that it “blew me away with its deceptively blithe mixture of cryptic humor, philosophical ingenuity, and genuine political yearning… . I hope it makes a splash out there in this overcrowded world.”
Below, Lim pulls the curtain back on the literary and extra–literary influences that went into his new book.
Read the list at the Library of America blog.
interview at The Chicago Review of Books
thanks to Sara Cutaia for this interview.
the headline might overstate things slightly. it wasn’t *constant* despair at any rate…
If you’re one of the millions of people who check the news every morning, you know citizens are joining marches and calling representatives daily. In the months since the election, we’ve seen the power of civil disobedience. And though these forms of dissent aren’t yet losing steam, they raise an interesting question: can these struggles continue in the face of capitalism?
Eugene Lim’s new novel Dear Cyborgs addresses this question as his characters meditate on art, political dissent, and purpose. In nestled narratives, the novel weaves a story of friendship that calls for a provocative conversation. If the novel is smart, the author is more so: Lim shared recently shared some of his thoughts on contemporary politics, the power of art, and a thorough reading list for those of us who want more after finishing Dear Cyborgs.
Read the interview here: https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/06/05/eugene-lim-dear-cyborgs-interview/
A conversation with Donald Breckenridge about our new books, volkswagens, emmanuel bove, and boris the bear…
Over at the FSG Work in Progress blog, Donald Breckenridge and I have a chat. Read the conversation here.
Cyborgs, comic book superheroes, protesters in the streets, disenfranchised artists, first-generation immigrants struggling to assimilate—all these outsiders, outcasts, and oddballs have more in common with each other than one might think, as Eugene Lim’s novel Dear Cyborgs beautifully illustrates. Blending Hollywood chase scenes with sharp cultural critiques, hard-boiled detective pulps with subversive philosophy, Dear Cyborgs is a playful and profound meditation on resisting oppression and alienation. Donald Breckenridge is the fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail and author of And Then, a novel about desolation, regret, and a “father’s long decline into humiliation and death.” Here the two longtime friends talk about the foreign filmmakers and authors who have inspired them to embrace their own “outsider-ness” as “helplessly American” artists and citizens.
short fiction on The Organist podcast
I pledge allegiance to @Joe_Frank as do the radio wizards at @KCRWorganist. On their latest episode — which covers hypnosis, thich nhat hanh, alan watts, and david blaine — I do a PSA for our collective virtual reality (at 32:13). why not give the whole a listen?
How does music resemble food? How can sound work like medicine? To treat chronic digestive pain, producer Ross Simonini tried everything until visiting hypnotherapist Daniel Ryan, who uses only the sound of his voice through a technique shared by orators, monks, musicians, parents—and magician David Blaine.
We also learn about the psychoacoustics of lawn sprinklers with Susan Rogers, a sound engineer who’s recorded albums for David Byrne, Barenaked Ladies, Tricky, and, most famously, Prince’s albums Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times. Rogers is one of the most legendary female sound engineers in an industry long dominated by men. These days, she’s also a professor at the Berklee School of Music, where she researches how our brains process sound.
Lastly, author Eugene Lim brings us speculative fiction on the interstellar connections between celebrity CEO Elon Musk and the Organist podcast itself.
Hypnosis segment produced by Ross Simonini.
Interview with Susan Rogers produced by Jenny Ament.Producers:
Ross Simonini
Andrew Leland
http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/the-organist/sleeping-knowledge
GERMINAL by émile zola
J’s on an intense Zola kick and this book was the one that started it. she said i had to read it. i went dragging my feet. a 500-page naturalist book from the 19th century seemed like it, um, was not going to be my bag. i imagined, semi-rightly, endless pages of description and plot not to mention a moribund philosophy and a long-ago decided politics. i slogged through the first half, which was better than i expected but still slow going.
and then something clicked. it wasn’t exactly needing to find out what happened next, it was a different kind of suspense…. it’s a spectacular biography of the mind of the mob, and with little piercing sketches of psychology. godlike in its handling of the landscape and the multiple minds of its society. like pedro costa in its use of natural light. and an honest, admirable, and relevant politics. (the title referenced finally on the last page, which seems countered by every page before it.)
it is said that sixty thousand marched at zola’s funeral. sixty. thousand.
and o god the horses of germinal. the horses of germinal are more awesome and terrible in their nightmares than the horses of nietzsche or tarr or tarkovsky.
two paragraphs, one from mid-way through and one from near the end, to give you a hint at its arc, as if you needed it. coal miners. won’t be but should be read by everyone who voted for trump and everyone who didn’t. we’re dying “miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” i didn’t want to read it but i’m shattered, glad, and changed now that i did.
It was a scarlet vision of the revolution that would inevitably carry them all away, on some blood-soaked fin de siècle evening. That was it, one night the people would rise up, cast caution aside, and run riot like this far and wide all over the countryside; and there would be rivers of bourgeois blood, their heads would be waved on pikes, their strong-boxes hacked open, and their gold poured all over the ground. The women would scream, and the men would look gaunt as wolves, their fangs drooling and gnashing. Yes, these same rags and the same thunder of clogs, the same terrifying pack of animals with dirty skins and foul breath, would sweep away the old world, as their barbarian hordes overflowed and surged through the land. There would be blazing fires, not a stone of the towns would be left standing, and they would become savages again, living out in the woods, once the poor had enjoyed their great orgy and garnered their harvest, sucked the women dry and sacked the cellars of the rich. There would be nothing left, not a sou of inherited wealth, not a line of legal entitlement, until the day when, perhaps, a new order might at last spring up from the earth. And that was the future out there, tearing down the road like some natural disaster, and buffeting their faces with its great hurricane wind.*
& from the last chapter:
‘You’re right, you’re better off leaving, if you can . . . And I’m glad I’ve seen you, because at least you’ll know I’ve got no axe to grind with you. There was a time I wanted to kill you, after all that butchery. But then you think it over, don’t you? You realize that in the end it’s not really anyone’s fault . . . No, it’s really not your fault, it’s everyone’s fault.’
