Fog & Car

Praise for Fog & Car

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"

"The dark dreamlike veracity of Lim’s novel might be remindful of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, Murakami and Auster, but its moving and revelatory insights into the mysteries of human nature are wholly his own.” —Library Journal, starred review

"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

"An uncommon, wistful novel that explores whether it is possible for one person to truly know another." —Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews

"Lim's debut is a testament to his literary prowess and his ability to craft stories that linger in the mind long after the final page is turned." —Shelf Unbound

“Eugene Lim has buried a layer of magic deep below the surface of the early chapters and it rises slowly as the narrative progresses. When it finally surfaces on the page, it shimmers along the edges of Sarah and Jim’s lives, turning the banal into the weird and supernatural.” —David Lewis, Compulsive Reader

“Lim’s fans will be happy to see this distinctive early work back in print.” —Publishers Weekly

“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