Waste reviewed by Spinetingler magazine

"Waste is one of those books that tolls the iron bell, a strong sense of foreboding murmurs right below the surface. You sit there waiting for the other foot to drop and you’re not disappointed when it does."

Read the rest at Spinetingler here.

Eugene Marten's WASTE reviewed in THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION

Eugene Marten’s Waste is blurbed up by the Lish School (including Lish himself) so I was expecting a quirkily written, intelligent effort more concerned with the structures of its sentences than narrative cohesion; what I got is a brutal, disturbing little novel that works beautifully both for those who read for story and those who read for the artistry—or at least those who read for those things but who can deal with a shocking amount of physical and psychological trauma distilled down into sharp, tight sentences.

Read the entire review at http://quarterlyconversation.com/waste-by-eugene-marten

Dennis Cooper gives a nice shout out to WASTE on his blog

Along with Blake Butler's SCORCH ATLAS, Tao Lin's SHOPLIFTING..., and Matt Bell's THE COLLECTORS, DC cites Eugene Marten's WASTE among books he's "read recently and loved."

Eugene Marten's WASTE reviewed in the Ottawa XPress

Geoffrey Brown's summer reading list in the Ottawa XPress includes Eugene Marten's Waste:

Eugene Marten's slim novella Waste (Ellipsis Press) details the day-to-day existence and experiences of Sloper, a janitor in a big-city office building. With unnerving clarity and precision, Marten starkly executes a chilling portrait of loneliness and anonymity, reminding us, in the process, that that which we might ever so casually discard and dismiss may not necessarily respond so casually in kind.

Check out the whole list at http://ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=17883

WASTE reviewed on Word Riot

[T]the banality of the day-to-day workaday eccentricities of a troubled janitor's lonely life is recorded with devastating precision... One might think that mentioning the novella's startling nods to "A Rose for Emily" and Psycho, would ruin its surprises, but the details of Waste's strengths lay not beneath a spoiler alert but within its acute attention to language, its profound empathy and understanding for its protagonist, and its underlying critique of the endless cycle of consumption and waste.

Read more at: http://wordriot.org/template_2.php?ID=1921

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.

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.