Eugene Lim is the author of Fog & Car and The Strangers. His writing has appeared in Fence, the Denver Quarterly, Little Star, Dazed, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. He is the founder and managing editor of Ellipsis Press and works as a librarian in a high school. He lives in Queens, New Y
Praise for Dear Cyborgs Dear Cyborgs 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. --Chris Kraus, BOMB Wondrous . . .
[Lim's] 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. Everything from radical art to political protest gets
absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life . . . [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's Page Turner Dear Cyborgs is a novel about art and
resistance, and how they may spur each other on, or frustrate their
respective goals. In structure it resembles the great mid-century
metafictions . . . Eugene Lim's super-comrades, with their cultural
disaffection and nuanced political opinions, offer a rather more
compelling version of a collective consciousness. --David Hobbs,
Times Literary Supplement Lim's third novel might be the most
delightful read you'll find all summer . . . Through seamlessly
incorporated meditations on political protest and radical art, Dear
Cyborgs is an effortless page turner that dares the reader to
believe in the power of the imagination. --Anelise Chen, The
Village Voice 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, New York
[Dear Cyborgs] is stuffed with more complex ideas than many books
three times its size . . . The ultimate message of Dear Cyborg
remains open to interpretation, but adventurous readers will be
glad they teamed up with Lim. --Michael Berry, San Francisco
Chronicle I think it is rare to encounter self-aware, genre-spliced
postmodernism that is this worldly and purposeful, or pop that is
this utilitarian, serious and searching, or timely
state-of-the-nation reckonings that are this optimistic, open, and
kindhearted. The union of seeming opposites, co-existing across 163
pages is, for me, a reason to be cheerful . . . [Dear Cyborgs] is
quite an achievement. --JW McCormack and Rosie Clarke, Electric
Literature This book sets out to defy categorization, and it
thoroughly succeeds. A wild and wildly intelligent work, Dear
Cyborgs skillfully employs elements of essay, noir, fantasy, and
pop in order to question the limitations of identity in the
Internet age. --Robert Martin, Rain Taxi Review A short but
important novel . . . Lim['s] experiments with form . . . willingly
mutate and fragment to mimic fractured lives and disaggregated
worlds. It's a quirk that becomes a virtue in a novel about
austerity, art, and everyday politics. --Jonathon Sturgeon, The
Baffler Dear Cyborgs is as daring and exciting as it is thoughtful,
and perhaps disheartening only because of the context in which it
exists. --Thomas Michael Duncan, Necessary Fiction Two radically
different story lines--one involving a short-lived friendship
between two Asian-American boys in the Midwest, the other an
ongoing philosophical debate amongst a team of superheroes--are
cleverly tied together in this short, sly, unorthodox novel . . .
The core relationships, whether they're between estranged childhood
friends or opinionated superhumans, are real and profoundly moving.
--Publishers Weekly, starred review Dear Cyborgs . . . sings the
tune of language itself, music that Gertrude Stein and Gordon Lish
could get behind, wherein the sentence is less a part than a whole
unto itself. --Josh Cook, Virginia Quarterly Review "One of the
smartest, strangest books I've read. This is a document of a side
of the Midwest that goes largely uncelebrated: the population of
tech-savvy, art-forward, and too often marginalized voices that
shape the region's identity from the edges. Dear Cyborgs is
brilliant in its blending of academic investigation and pop-culture
tropes, and structurally invigorating from start to finish. I'm not
quite sure what to call it, other than a total blast." --Robert
Martin, Midwest Independent Booksellers Association Eugene Lim's
Dear Cyborgs is a secret tunnel fresh with cool, strange storms.
What is it to be super? What is it to be beyond? Dear Cyborgs is
ripe with mysteries, heroes, even heartache. --Samantha Hunt,
author of Mr. Splitfoot Eugene Lim tells his sly superhero tales in
a kind of hard-boiled deadpan--a voice at once incongruously comic
and playfully soulful. Beneath the dry wit there's an ache of
loneliness, an echo of every comic-book reader's yearning for the
camaraderie of the super team, the intimate enmity of the nemesis.
--Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes [An] entertaining
reflection on art, resistance, heroes, and villains . . . eerily
reflective of our fractured times, darting from subject to subject
with the speed of a mouse click. A colorful meditation on
friendship and creation nested within a fictional universe.
--Kirkus Reviews Eugene Lim is amazing because he's really
adventurous with form and style ... It's so hard to break apart
fiction and do something really unusual with it, and to do it so
gracefully. --Dennis Cooper Praise for The Strangers:
Beautifully written, so precise and accurate to real life. --Lydia
Davis Beautiful, original, with delicious surprises lurking at the
heart of sentences, of events, of all the engines of communication.
--Harry Mathews Praise for Fog and Car:
In this astonishing, assured first novel 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 and Car down; harder for me to
stop thinking about. --Lynn Crawford In this debut novel . . .
Eugene Lim doesn't as much collect and catalogue the fragments of
lives shared, as artfully piece them into a puzzle reflective of
players whose moves were induced by seemingly inconsequent forces .
. . [A] phenomenal ability to nestle revelatory gems in the corners
of his muscular text. --Erin McKnight, Bookslut
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