Fog & Car

by Eugene Lim

Overview

Fiction. Marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, Jim Fog succumbs to purposelessness and nostalgia while his ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City with the ambition of skipping over any mourning for their marriage. And old friend, ignorant himself of his action's consequences, enables the two protagonists to move through and haunt each other's lives. Eventually, the momentum of Fog and Car's alternating narratives push the two characters out of their static life-cages towards different unreal conclusions, and the narratives' shifting styles finally find a stunning equilibrium in a troubled and subversive escapism. Gary Lutz writes, "Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780963753601
Publisher:	Ellipsis Press
Publication date:	09/15/2008
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Fog & Car

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024
A Bookshop.org Most Anticipated Book of 2024
A Reactor Can’t Miss Book of 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

“A tale of lonesome domesticity that transcends into a metaphysical suspense story.” —Simon Lowe, Full Stop

"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

“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 and 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

“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

From the Publisher