Eugene Lim in conversation with Ian Drieblatt
City Lights and Coffee House Press celebrate the publication of a new edition of
Fog & Car
by Eugene Lim
Published by Coffee House Press
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.
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.
Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator and musician. Recent translations include Gogol’s The Nose and Comradely Greetings, a book of prison correspondence between Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Slavoj Žižek. Last year he published two chapbooks: sonnets, from Metambesen, and barishonah, from DoubleCross Press. Other work has appeared in The Agriculture Reader, Pallaksch. Pallaksch., the Boog City Portable Reader, Elderly, Web Conjunctions, Bomblog and elsewhere. He likes walking and talking.
Praise for Fog & Car
Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2024”
Bookshop.org “100 Most Anticipated Books of 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
“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
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation