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Eugene Lim
EUGENE LIM is the author of the novels Fog & Car (Ellipsis Press, 2008), The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013) and Dear Cyborgs (FSG, 2017). He works as a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, NY.
Fiction: The Trojan War Will Take Place
By Eugene LimZachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey, winner of Starcherone’s penultimate fiction prize, purports to be an ancient text, recently decoded by the author along with a moonlighting NSA cryptographer, which gives variants on Homer’s epic of the Trojan War. (You can pick it up for the preface alone, a devilishly clever history of the text’s “discovery” and interpretation.)
Returning to the Problem
By Eugene LimI was being tortured so lost my mind a little. In the beginning they would fold me into a small box and leave me there. Then, after I wouldn’t give them what was impossible for me to give them, they left me alone in a dark cell
Shaggy Dog
By Eugene LimAfter I lost the dog on the highway, that is, after I lost Frank, I flew my drone around in widening ever-panicking gyres until my battery died and the drone went crashing onto the sidewalk. I didn’t even bother to retrieve it but got in the van and, rather numb, drove home, parked, went into the kitchen for a glass of water, sat down on the couch, and then wept into my hands. So close… and yet so far away, I kept repeating to myself.
According to YJ, The Origin of the Long Island City Kinoclub
By Eugene LimEarlier, when we were younger, we were best friends and, for a night, lovers. It was difficult because he was straight and liked girl-next-door types and I was basically appalled but we weren’t boogie so we could do it but it was, frankly, bogus, just to wild out. But even before that I was his cinematographer.
The Nameable : on experimental writing
By Eugene LimI’d like to propose a definition that modifies Zukofsky’s metaphor to clarify and broaden the term of “experimental writing” and which thus hopefully rehabilitates it from the censure of the many — including a formally daring writer like Erickson — who view the province of experimental writing as a naval-gazing warren, an unpopular gymnasium occupied solely by the effete.
Spooky Action at a Distance
By Eugene LimIt’s when the cop is punching my face that I make the decision. I decide to go look for my sister. My whole life I’d indulged in a stupid thrill, a very risky habit. In the middle of the night I’d sneak through the town and deface posters of the beloved president.
Remembering Gilbert Sorrentino
By Eugene LimA writer of constant invention, Gilbert Sorrentino was a maverick artist who, in each of his seventeen fiction works, reinvented the idea of the novel. Entwined with this basic avant-garde helix were Sorrentino’s repeating concerns: the pretension, corruption, and fakery of New York’s art scene; the unyielding and common brutality of poverty, its propagation of sadism; mid-century, working-class Brooklyn; the ineffable artificiality of art.
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