Blake Butler reviews Fog & Car

Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing....

More at: http://blakebutler.blogspot.com/2008/10/eugene-lims-fog-car-boinking-in-baby.html

Launch Party for WASTE and FOG & CAR

Eugene Marten reads from Waste.

Eugene Lim reads from Fog & Car.


...and some audio:

Jason Rice reviews WASTE at the Three-Guys-One-Book blog

Eugene Marten writes with a chiseled flair that is basically unheard of in today's fiction market, at least in the books you'll find on the shelves in your local stores. There isn't a simple way to describe it, or how to believe the feelings you have once inside these sentences. Then you marvel at how you got so caught up in this main characters mundane attempt to clean up after people.

More at: http://threeguysonebook.blogspot.com/2008/10/waste-by-eugene-marten.html

Come help us celebrate the launch of Waste and Fog & Car

Come help us celebrate the launch of Waste and Fog & Car on

Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 7:30PM at Freebird Books

on 123 Columbia Street in Brooklyn. Directions here.

Fog & Car reviewed on Bookslut

Erin McKnight writes, "In this debut novel documenting the aftermath of a shattered marriage—its disintegration evident in the artifacts of memory and loss strewn across an abandoned landscape—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." More at: http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2008_10_013525.php

Upstart Publishers E-Panel

We participated on an e-panel with several other new presses–organized by Dan Wickett of DZANC books. Participants included:

Kathleen M. Rooney and Abigail Beckel – Rose Metal Press
Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen – Short Flight/Long Drive Books, a division of Hobart
Johannah Rodgers and Eugene Lim – Ellipsis Press
Aaron Petrovich and Alex Rose – Hotel St. George Press
Giancarlo Di Trapano – Tyrant Books
Victoria Blake – Underland Press
Peter Cole – Keyhole Books

The LATIMES bookblog wrote it up:

Why found an independent press? And why do it now? Ellipsis Press’ Eugene Lim has an answer:

I’d like to think an indie movement is going on. Twelve years ago there was an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, titled “The Future of Fiction,” and edited by none other than David Foster Wallace. In it, there’s a hilarious and dead-on piece by Dalkey head John O’Brien, which stated among other things that the “end of literary books in commercial publishing is a historical inevitability.” And so it has come to pass. The bigger houses will cease (have ceased!) to publish literary fiction. It is not profitable for them to market and produce a title that will sell to 5000 people (even if Rick Moody strong-arms a National Book Award for them). S’okay though. The old publishing joke goes, How do you make a small fortune in publishing? Answer: Start with a large one. And then you and your crony get to laugh bitterly together. But it’s the wrong question. A small and lively (and one hopes resurging) group of people care about the novel as art. And with the new methods of production and distribution, it’s getting easier for writers to connect with readers.

here’s the panel in its entirety: http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/emerging_writers_network/2008/09/e-panel-publish.html

Derek and Eugene at the Brooklyn Bookfest

"The next day we got up early and took the subway to Brooklyn. Met Eugene Lim and lugged our collective books (Calamari, Ellipsis, 3rd Bed and Kwani?) to the Brooklyn Book Festival. Thanks to all that braved the epic heat to stop by. Tao Lin stopped by and as always picked up a couple of books. So even if he is involved in dubious literary hijinx such as selling a book he hadn't even written yet for $12,000, his profiteering goes to a worthy cause. Albeit a financially losing cause (didn't even make enough to pay for the table). No matter. A bunch of people stopped by asking for Binyavanga, since he had a scheduled speaking engagement at the festival. He emailed me the night before saying he couldn't get a visa. Good thing I had some Kwanis that I brought with me to hawk. Teju Cole was one of those that stopped by asking for Binya. He had his book with him, but wouldn't sell it to me, damn it. Matvei Yankelevich of Ugly Ducking stopped by. Amy Hempel even stopped by our table. At one point, I think it was while I was talking to Justin Taylor, it felt like the book festival was taking place inside a sauna bath. Most everyone was dripping sweat, but trying to make the best of it. Afterwards I felt like we had all run a marathon. Luckily I was dressed for the occasion, like a recovering junky tennis player in all black, in mourning for DFW. "
From Derek White's blog. More at: http://www.5cense.com/NYC_Revisisted.htm

Matt Bell reviews Waste at NewPages.com

Eugene Marten's second novel Waste will entrance you from the very first page, drawing you in with its tight, evocative language and magnificent pacing. For the first third of the book, you'd be excused if you thought that all you were getting was a wonderfully written but generally quiet book about a creepy janitor working late nights in a high-rise office building. You'd be wrong, but your mistake would be understandable, and quickly rectified: What follows is one of the most disturbing stories I've read.
More at: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/Default.htm#waste

The Cleveland Scene's profile of Eugene Marten

IN THE MODERN WORLD of letters, Eugene Marten is an anomaly. No MFA, no writing program, no writers’ group, no conferences, no divine inspiration, no family storytelling tradition, no rich mommy or daddy, no agent. Nothing but Marten writing for two to three hours every day before work. A day’s work before the paying job, usually something manual (not menial) — printer, locksmith, janitor, security guard, driver. The kinds of jobs, necessary but not highly valued, that if properly performed render the doer largely invisible. Not unlike the job of writing a book.
More at: http://www.freetimes.com/stories/11/26/books-the-wasteland-novelist-eugene-marten-finds-poetry-in-manual-labor

Blake Butler reviews Waste

I read WASTE by Eugene Marten (brand new from Ellipsis Press) day before yesterday, I am most impressed by Marten's ability to write about overlooked everyday people in a way that makes their lives seem layered like a secret door, like every person is a door into some small compartment where they keep things they value, where they sleep. WASTE is maybe a 2 hour read and will jar your teeth out some, no, really. It has a blurb by Gordon Lish, what do you think about that. It is about a janitor who goes around in this one buildings working with trash. I will read anything Eugene Marten's for the rest of my life, I feel like he is important. His sentences are sentences in the realest application of the word, in that each one kind of condemns itself on the paper or in you in your own mind.
More at: http://blakebutler.blogspot.com/2008/08/smarmump-eliminator.html

Steve Himmer reviews Waste

Reading Eugene Marten’s Waste is like reading the margins of Then We Came to the End, or inspecting the after dark corners of the corporate office building where Waste’s cleaning crew protagonist Sloper works.
More at: http://www.tawnygrammar.org/notes/2893/waste-by-eugene-marten

Is-that-so-wrong blogs about Waste

Although in recent years I've turned into a voracious reader, it only happens once or twice a year that I find a work of literary fiction that grabs me by the lapels and pulls me to the end in a breathless flurry of page-turning. This year’s most recent recipient of this honor: Waste by Eugene Marten.

More at: http://isthatsowrong.blogspot.com/2008/09/necrophilia-for-all.html

Josh Maday blogs about Waste

"I can say that Waste tracked little hexes of dried blood across my brain with rugged work boots. It's definitely a dark novel.... The writing is a precise and rusty cutting instrument. Marten's sentences are clipped and rich. Distilled to the essence. The deadpan matter of fact tone creates the perfect feeling of Sloper's numb indifferent sickness that goes unchecked in his isolation."
More at: http://joshmaday.blogspot.com/2008/09/somebody-yelled-and-music-faded.html

Ellipsis Press announces new books from Marten and Lim!

Praise for Eugene Marten's Waste

"Dark and difficult, with clipped sentences and pungent passages, [Waste] concerns a janitor whose use of office workers' waste and personal objects is queasy…. a look at humanity from the slick insides of a wastebasket."
Angle: a Journal of Arts + Culture

"Only Eugene Marten can keep a reader enthralled with the minutiae of a janitorial existence. From the most unlikely of subjects Marten constructs, with great care and taking joy in every sentence, a spellbinding work. Precisely and exquisitely detailed, Waste is a stark little masterpiece."
–Brian Evenson

"There is nothing quite like the controlled burn of Eugene Marten's prose. Waste is an exhilarating and unnerving piece of fiction."
–Sam Lipsyte

"When a poet pal had put a copy of Waste into my hands, I right away went nuts until I had gotten myself in touch with its author for to add to my household a supply of enough copies to scare all my writer friends with. Here, said I, in wild proclamation, is one for history and a half."
–Gordon Lish

"This is surely one of the darkest and most jarring books I've read. It is also pitch-perfect. Waste wastes nothing–not a syllable, a beat, a ragged breath."
–Dawn Raffel

Purchase from Ellipsis Press or buy through SPD, Powell's, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

Praise for Eugene Lim's Fog & 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

"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. Mr. Lim is definitely a writer to watch."
—Steve Katz

"In Fog & Car, 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."
—Gary Lutz

Purchase from Ellipsis Press or buy through SPD, Powell's, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.