Lim peels relentlessly at his story’s realism until it tugs loose, revealing much stranger happenings underneath… a disturbing mystery pitched somewhere between Mulholland Drive and City of Glass... [I]t never loses its appealing initial tone of aching loneliness, even as its characters and its goings-on grow increasingly supernatural.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Eugene Lim's Fog & Car reviewed in The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Eugene Marten reads for latest UNSAID issue
Ellipsis Press author Eugene Marten reads as part of the great UNSAID's issue launch this Monday at KGB.
http://kgbbar.com/calendar/events/unsaid_launch_party/
Monday, June 1, 2009
Fog & Car reviewed on NewPages
How Lim manages to negotiate the reversals, to maintain believability, to take the reader with him, is only part of his success, for it is, ironically, the story’s lack of resolution that brings satisfaction… It balances, albeit in a detached tone, compassionate depictions of moral dissolution with Murakami-styled fabulist plot departures, dramatic reversals, and coincidental connections. It leaves the reader with a balled up jumble of narrative threads, but in such a sophisticated and befuddling manner as to force Murakami’s own mind into a tailspin. Fog & Car is an extraordinary debut.Read more at: http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2009_06/june2009_book_reviews.htm
Friday, May 15, 2009
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
Thursday, April 2, 2009
New Norman Lock website
Ellipsis Press will be publishing Norman Lock's SHADOWPLAY later this year. His latest novel is called THE KING OF SWEDEN from Ravenna Press. His website just got a relaunch and it's a good place to get acquainted with his fantastic and various work. A bit of praise from it:
"All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass."
–Kate Bernheimer
"[Lock's] prose is melodial, and alert to every signal from the unseen."
--Gary Lutz
"Lock's weapon is words, and he uses them well....like a nightmare that wakes you up shaking, forcing you to reassess your life."
—LA Life
"Lock’s language, though basically sleek and minimal, combines the high gloss and perspicuity of the Edwardian age with the robustness and vigor of American inventiveness, leavened by a facility for maximizing – to marvelous effect – the dichotomy between the sign and its object."
–– John Olson, First Intensity
"In truth? In truth, Lock writes it, Lish reads it! – which is a damn sight more than Lish will say for Proust."
–– Gordon Lish
Read more about Norman Lock here.
Ellipsis Press featured in Time Out New York
In a cover story about do-it-yourselfers' various workarounds, Ellipsis Press author and publisher Eugene Lim gets profiled. Full story at:
http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/features/72815/take-charge/2.html
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
The good, the bad, and the slightly confusing....
The ever generous, flâneuring Derek White takes a walkabout NYC and does some ruminating on Fog & Car:
A critical, sometimes complimentary review of WASTE by Vanessa Place in The American Book Review. Arguably it underestimates the use of class in the book--but judge for yourself:
It starts out with some friendly fire:
_____________On the plane here I watched some movies, most not worth mentioning besides Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I did see some program on Andy Warhol though, and they were talking about his movies, the ones where he would put a camera on people, unscripted, without guidance, and then leave the room. They'd leave the camera on them for hours, until something had to give. Somebody commentating on it was saying something about how Warhol dances this fine line between what’s exciting and boring. And how this is sexual or some such thing. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, except to say that maybe Fog & Car skates this same fine line. Through rout reiteration, Lim pushes boring to the extreme that it becomes exciting. How does Lim do this? To quote his character, “the normal always let my mind go the farthest, always the immediate physical world was navigable without thinking, so that thinking would head elsewhere, deep into its own self-contained jungle.”
more at: http://www.5cense.com/zero_sum.htm
A critical, sometimes complimentary review of WASTE by Vanessa Place in The American Book Review. Arguably it underestimates the use of class in the book--but judge for yourself:
http://americanbookreview.org/sampleReview.asp?Issue=10&id=20
It starts out with some friendly fire:
Eugene Marten is a writer's writer, a writer after whom many other writers would be happy to clean up, his books provoking the sort of breathless admiration usually reserved for the deceased... Marten writes precisely. He writes to the point. His sentences are crisp and clean as fresh cider. His paragraphs unfold with the grace of small paper swans. He writes of things in their thingness, abject in their sobbing objectivity. If his books were marsupials, they'd be opossums. If furniture, Ottomans. He eschews similes and metaphors like these, preferring the raw truths of things simply said.
_____________
Also Thomas McGonigle writes something about both Waste and Fog & Car. For example:
I have tried to read each of the books.
I know that Marten has published an earlier book with Turtle Point Press.
I am interested in why I have not read more. The Marten book is in the tradition of Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.
I am probably not strong enough to read about a janitor and what he collects.
FOG & CAR by LIM is more appealing but I can’t get beyond the names: MR FOG and SARAH CAR.
The rest at his blog: http://abcofreading.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-and-old-lim-marten-and-fine.html
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
HARP & ALTAR & MAD HATTERS’ REVIEW PRESENT
Come by and hear some great writers of unconventional fiction chosen by the editors of Harp & Altar and the Mad Hatters' Review.
Joshua Cohen is the author of four books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue State Press, 2007) and A Heaven of Others (Starcherone, 2007). Another novel, Graven Imaginings, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press. Essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. North Vain, Bluff, from which the piece that appears in the current issue of Harp & Altar is excerpted, is the second book of a series entitled Two Great Russian Novels. He lives in Brooklyn.
Tim Horvath, whose fiction appears in the current issue of MHR, won the 2006 Raymond Carver Short Story Award and the ‘06 prize of the Society for the Study of the Short Story. His stories are out or forthcoming in Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Fiction, Web Conjunctions, SleepingFish, Sein und Werden, and elsewhere. He teaches a class for Grub Street Writers in Boston centered on the application of findings from brain science to writing and literature. His novella Circulation, called “a glittering narrative performance” by David Huddle, will be released as a short book by Sunnyoutside Press in January 2009. He is currently working on a novel in which one or more (it is unclear which) microscopic counter-novels fester in the interstices of the typeface and must be eradicated lest the infra-structure come crashing down.
Joanna Howard is the author of Frights of Fancy, a collection of short prose forthcoming from Boa Editions. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters and Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. A chapbook In the Colorless Round, with artwork by novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, is available from Noemi Press. Her “Seascape” appeared in Harp & Altar #2.
Mary Mackey, with poems forthcoming in MHR Issue 11, is a poet and novelist who lives in Berkeley, California. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including Breaking The Fever (Marsh Hawk Press); one experimental novella, Immersion; and fourteen novels, including A Grand Passion(Simon & Schuster), The Year the Horses Came (HarperCollins), The Notorious Mrs. Winston(Putnam/Berkley Books), and The Widow’s War (Putnam/Berkley Books--in press for Fall 2009). Mackey’s works have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. She has lectured at Harvard and the Smithsonian, is past president of the West Coast branch of PEN, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emeritus of English at California State University. A member of the Writers Guild of America, West, she wrote the screenplay for the award-winning feature film Silence. More information about her can be found at www.marymackey.com. and at www.marshhawkpress.org.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
