- Publisher : Coffee House Press (July 16, 2024)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 256 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1566896932
- ISBN-13 : 978-1566896931
Long out of print, Eugene Lim's wry and haunting debut novel returns to shelves with a new introduction from Renee Gladman and a fresh, reversible cover.
Jim Fog is marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, succumbing to aimless nostalgia. His ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City, hoping to skip right over any mourning period for their marriage. Despite everything, Jim and Sarah find they're still connected through an old, shared friend. When they both decide to chase him down, the resulting coincidences and cryptic occurrences culminate in a trading of souls that blurs the lines between reality and something much stranger.
A moving mystery about loss, grief, and the loneliness of the human condition, Fog & Car was hailed as the arrival of a masterful new voice in American fiction on its initial publication; now, more than a decade later, it reads as nothing less than prophetic.
Review
Literary Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2024"
Bookshop.org “100 Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
Reactor, "Can’t Miss Indie Press Speculative Fiction for July and August 2024"
"Fans of Dear Cyborgs and Search History will be delighted to see the genesis of Lim’s searching and curious style." —Literary Hub
“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?” —Shinjini Dey, Cleveland Review of Books
“Fog & Car’s tale of the aftermath of a divorce, in which its characters’ lives grow increasingly bizarre, demonstrates Lim’s skill at evoking the quotidian and the evocative.” —Tobias Carroll, Reactor
“Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural. His gift for ingenious, startling permutations of language and plot make for a memorable, mesmerizing read. It was hard for me to put Fog & Car down; harder for me to stop thinking about.” —Lynn Crawford
“The events of this novel take place in a space contrary to action, illuminating the silences of the page and the nothing that haunts the borders of ‘doing something.’ A beautifully paced and thoughtful work.” —Renee Gladman
“In Fog & Car, Eugene Lim scalpels deep into the loneliness of coupledom, into divorce, into obsession and stalking, into casual hookups, into homoerotic shocks. The book slowly heats its duos until they come to a rolling boil, blistering out surprises and unexpected complexities.” —Steve Katz
“Eugene Lim’s impressive debut novel . . . has the shape of a long turnpike that runs into an urban snarl of on and off ramps. Suddenly every incidental thread of the early, gently paced narrative knots up into a supernatural tangle of a plot—souls are exchanged, coincidences multiply . . . To defy novelistic conventions is easy enough. The difficulty comes in custom-building new forms for a story, and new stories for these new forms. Suiting the action to the word and the word to the action is no easy feat, but it is one that Lim has achieved with his first tragicomic novel.” —The Brooklyn Rail
“Lim peels relentlessly at his story’s realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath . . . a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass . . . [I]t never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction
Past Praise:
Praise for Search History
Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2021”
The Millions, "Most Anticipated of 2021”
Literary Hub, “22 Novels You Need to Read This Fall”
Bustle, “Best Books of October 2021”
“A post-human manifesto on loss, identity, and the transfigurative potential of art. . . . This brilliant sui generis takes storytelling to new heights.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“As befits a book dealing with death and rebirth, the novel oscillates between the uncanny and the philosophical. . . . Lim brings together the mundane and the extraordinary to powerful effect.” —Kirkus, starred review
“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 Filippo, The Washington Post
“Sometimes new works arrive, such as Eugene Lim’s strange, sinuous, highly memorable novel Search History that seem to herald some dawning technological epoch. . . . A work of eerie and lasting power.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Praise for Dear Cyborgs
Vol. 1 Brooklyn, “Favorite Fiction Books of 2017”
Literary Hub, “Staff Favorite Books 2017”
“Wondrous . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life—even if it’s displaced into a bizarre, parallel world—drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs.” —Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
About the Author
Eugene Lim is the author of the novels The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2022). His writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Baffler, Dazed, Fence, Little Star, Granta, and elsewhere. He is a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, New York, with Joanna and Felix.
