Eugene Lim is a writer, high school librarian, and founder and publisher of Ellipsis Press. The author of four novels—The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2022)—his debut novel, Fog & Car, originally published by Ellipsis Press in 2008, is now being reissued by Coffee House Press. Lim’s writing occupies numerous lanes, playing with the conventions of the form and signifiers of genre fiction to construct works that are thoroughly singular. His work is as concerned with and grounded in the political and social conditions of our time as it is deeply evocative and probing of humanity and human relationships, and the range of emotions we can experience within them. Reading Fog & Car, I felt as though it seared me in the best possible way.
Ahead of the reissue, Lim was kind enough to weather a storm of technical issues to join me in conversation via video chat and discuss identity, his influences, genre, and form. His humor, wit, and thoughtfulness shine in conversation just as much as they do on the page.
Meghana Kandlur: Could you tell me how the Fog & Car reissue came to be and what changes were made from the original publication?
Eugene Lim: I was fortunate enough that Coffee House published Search History, which came out in 2021. I’m grateful to Chris Fischbach [the former publisher of Coffee House Press], who agreed to republish two of my previous novels. My first novel, Fog & Car, which was published on my small press Ellipsis Press in 2008, they’re going to bring out this summer. And then The Strangers, which was published by John Yau’s small press Black Square Editions in 2013, Coffee House is going to bring that out in spring of 2026.
What, if any, do you see as the continuity between your novels?
I don’t know if I’ve forced a continuity upon them, or if I would even describe them as continuous, but they’re all written by me. So there’s a kind of obvious continuity in that sense. There are some characters that run through most or many of the novels—or the characters’ names do. And so there is therefore a revisiting of a world each time, but that revisiting idea has changed or grown over the course of the novels. I don’t think I had that idea when I wrote Fog & Car.
I asked because you previously mentioned that you’re currently working on a new book. I was wondering how you see it—I would imagine there’s a progression between the texts and I was wondering if that was something that was conscious on your part or if you see each text as its own distinct separate individual work.
I kind of see them as different eras of obsession. Fog & Car was the first one. I think it was wrestling with form for a few reasons: a) because it’s my first novel, but also b) I’m of that generation—and this is not good or bad—but the last one that grew up without the internet in some way. I mean the widespread adoption of email practices, of digital practices, that we think of as the internet really weren’t there when I was a young adult writing Fog & Car. There are no cell phones in Fog & Car. That sets it off quite a bit from the other novels. It stands out because it was concerned with form and it was kind of written in a literary world or in a world of language which was prior to the internet, and that makes a huge difference.
From The Strangers on, there is this technique of stitched monologues that came into being for a lot of reasons. One is the fragmented and yet constant text-based world we go through that is the internet. It seems to be changing a lot, but it’s still largely text-based. So that monologue kind of stitch or fragmentation came to be in the next novels. Each one had a different obsession. Dear Cyborgs was largely about protest culture, Search History was about grief. The Strangers again was still thinking about storytelling itself, about form in many ways.
How has Fog & Car been recontextualized with the 2024 reissue? Do you think people reading it now—readers who are encountering the text for the first time through this reissue—will bring a different context to it?
Absolutely. I mean, I finished the novel in the summer of 2001. I kind of say that in the acknowledgements in the back. And the world shifted because of 9/11, the world shifted because of the adoption of the iPhone, the world shifted a lot with the birth of the internet and email. And this kind of technological revolution and globalization happening at the same time shifted the whole world in a very significant way. So what you’re revisiting is a use of language—the use of language to depict the consciousness that came before fragmentation by the internet, so that’s kind of interesting. I also think that the present moment is a world that is connected but the connections between people are in some ways less tenuous. I don’t know if they’ve become any more or less mysterious, but we are all tethered with these kinds of digital connections in ways that make it hard to lose people. It’s easy to ghost people, but it’s hard actually to totally lose someone.
What do you see as the relationship in your work between character and identity?
Character is a literary construct. It’s a bunch of ideations tagged with a name or a kind of idea of a person, but it’s just really language tagged towards an idea.
And identity is that same idea but in the world. All the narratives and all the ways that we construct ideas of personhood is identity. And if you play around with that technology of character, if you deconstruct it, I think what you find is character, like identity, is something that is constructed and has no essential nature, or its essential nature is very interdependent on many many many things. So I think the technology of character in novels points to this general understanding about identity. Or vice versa—both ways.
I feel like there is a tendency, especially when something is in any way diverse, for the publisher to include that as part of the marketing—if something is related to race, related to queerness and sexuality, even coming-of-age, that is maybe externally thrust upon a text that isn’t itself necessarily directly concerned with it. If you look up Dear Cyborgs, one of its descriptors has to do with Asian American identity. Is that an intentional exploration on your part as well? What is the intention behind the way that certain characters are written and the identities that they hold with respect to your own personal identity?
So that’s another way that the world totally changed; when those first two novels came out, diversity in publishing was not a thing. That’s a response to the kind of monolithic record of publishing. It’s not just a change in publishing but the idea of identity politics, the idea of intersectionality, all those things which were on campuses in the ‘90s and described then as a kind of “multicultural” moment went away. They came back recently with more developed theoretical frameworks. But during the time that I was working on Fog & Car, certainly those ideas were not really present in publishing. If you were to write about identity you often got ghettoized. They were not interested in that story. Publishers and critics were not interested in that story.
At the same time I often think of a question asked in an interview with Adrian Tomine, the graphic artist/cartoonist. He wrote for years an autobiographical character in his comics and he often—
This is in the Optic Nerve series?
Optic Nerve, yeah. In an interview with Terry Gross, she asked him if he drew his main surrogate character without eyes to avoid discussion about identity. He responded that this was a strange thing that he’d been accused of, but that his eyeless character actually comes from a long tradition of a certain comic style. Even later and elsewhere, he said he’s liberated by this authenticity idea, the idea that Asian American art is definitionally art made by Asian Americans. And Tomine is my age too, and I think he does begin to tackle issues of identity more directly in later work.
I think of that evolution a lot. I think that I too made a similar one. I wasn’t quite sure how to speak of my identity and its particularities and it’s been an evolving kind of problem. Or the answer. The problem might not be evolving but my answer certainly has been evolving, and how to approach it. It’s not a clean issue.
It’s a complicated issue: what you want to represent, who you feel like you can or should represent, what it means to represent. Search History speaks about the idea of authenticity, the idea of what it means to be racially marked or to represent a “culture” or an “identity.” So that idea of authenticity is visited explicitly in Search History. I’ve been thinking about how to answer those questions as I’ve evolved.
How does the often experimental form that you’ve chosen match the stories you’re trying to tell?
Well, the small presses allow that risk of innovation of form—the settling on form or the working out of form, like the poet Robert Creeley, who says something about the relationship between form and content: “Form is not separable from content,” or “Form is content,” or something like that. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
The emotion maybe starts it. There’s a thing, there’s a feeling, or a story or a narrative that you have an inclination for. But the form when you are writing—the form in terms of the voice of that particular idea or that particular story—comes in the moment of trying to write.
There’s this idea that I think came from Raymond Roussel that was told to me by a writer-professor named Gilbert Sorrentino. And he said Roussel would say that the moment of writing is when the pen touches the paper, and then Sorrentino would update it and say it’s when the pads of your fingers touch the keyboard. And this speaks against the false idea that writing is a transfer of ideas from the head: you have this idea, and you transfer it to the page. That doesn’t really happen. Because it’s not in your head. It is born only when your fingers touch the keyboard or when the pen nib touches the page. In that moment, that’s when the writing occurs, and I think that that points to where form and content are born together.
What is your relationship in your own work to questions of genre and categorization? Categorization I would say is separate because that’s also informed in a way by your work as a librarian. But genre, what is your relationship with it, given that your works often play with and subvert and reinvent tropes of genre fiction?
I think Fog & Car is almost a prelude to that. It’s an investigation of different styles, different ways, different forms. And then it moves closer and closer to a suspense tale or a tale where there’s more forward-driven plot movement. What genre can give us is that genre has been so exploited and is so successful that we can take tropes from genres and very quickly build a world which is recognizable to a reader, whether it’s a chase scene or a superhero action moment or a romantic scene. I could briefly describe a scene and you would immediately have an idea of mood, vibe, context, and affect. Our sense of genre has evolved so intensely that you can use them quite quickly to bring in other ideas or ideas that we might not expect from a detective story or an action scene. That disjuncture or that conflict can be interesting and comical.
Fog & Car is not a traditional mystery, but there is this kind of mysterious element: well, what’s happened here, exactly? I think it’s something that really only becomes clear the more that you progress through the book.
Fog & Car is about this dichotomy that one comes to as a young person, which is “how do I be, how should I be?” To quote the Sheila Heti title, How Should a Person Be? Or, “what is adulthood?” A young person has to choose a path, and it’s an excruciating time because once one chooses the path, doors close. They don’t all close at once, and you can revisit certain paths, but there is a sense of time’s arrow and a sense of choices having to be made. And one of the things that I think Fog & Car thinks about is two ways to tell that story, kind of the story of progress or the story of accepting the illusion of progress or progress’s illusory nature. And so in Fog & Car, I think the reader or the characters are confronted with that idea of what should I be doing and how can I make progress versus there’s no right way and there’s no goal or progress that is all-justifying. You’re in a morass or you still have a dilemma. So those two things are kind of represented stylistically. In a way, they’re also represented by not necessarily genre but by the type of flow of the narrative.
I have been thinking about this idea of fiction as a space that is kind of entered and progressed or navigated through. It’s been complicated by a coworker who, when she reads, cannot visualize the space that is being described. Even if it’s being described in vivid detail, she does not see it in her mind’s eye. This has caused some points of contention or difficulty with her—I think particularly in the realm of genre fiction or fantasy that is more world-building in nature. How do you envision the space of your work that readers are ushered into, and especially playing off of this idea of progression: are we progressing or are we being kind of stopped in our tracks and foiled? Is it always necessary for the reader to feel as though they are making progress through the text?
Yeah, I think that those are important questions. I think there are lots of different kinds of readers: to each reader their book is a library law. A writer named Eugene Marten once told me that he liked to build scenes purely out of language. I might be misquoting here, but the idea was generally that there is a way to construct a visual feeling, maybe not a scene, not an actual visual scene, but a visual feeling via language, and that’s what he would strive for. A writer can approach visual scenes from sound and from language, which points to the difference between visual storytelling and literary storytelling.
We live in this visually-drenched moment where we can see incredibly beautiful moving detailed things on a screen in very high-resolution definition and in all kinds of computer manipulation or even just beautiful straight natural photography. How can the novel compete with it? You could try to create these huge worlds using description, and of course, people do that wonderfully. But there’s also the idea that what separates the novel or literature from the visual is the ability for novels to depict interiority. Movies and TV shows, as brilliant as they are, cannot do that as well: you can have a voiceover narration, but that’s language entering into the picture. Novels do interiority really well; that’s probably why one of the advantages of reading fiction is that it increases our sense of empathy. We can begin to understand other personhoods and thinking, the cognition of others. I think that if there is a future for the novel—which I do hope that there is—it might be less in its ability to depict the visual world and more in its ability to depict cognition through language.
Meghana Kandlur is a reader and writer based in Chicago, IL. They are interested in all that prose can be.
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