Fog & Car

Long out of print, Eugene Lim's wry and haunting debut novel returns to shelves with a new introduction from Renee Gladman and a fresh, reversible cover.

Jim Fog is marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, succumbing to aimless nostalgia. His ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City, hoping to skip right over any mourning period for their marriage. Despite everything, Jim and Sarah find they're still connected through an old, shared friend. When they both decide to chase him down, the resulting coincidences and cryptic occurrences culminate in a trading of souls that blurs the lines between reality and something much stranger.

A moving mystery about loss, grief, and the loneliness of the human condition, Fog & Car was hailed as the arrival of a masterful new voice in American fiction on its initial publication; now, more than a decade later, it reads as nothing less than prophetic.

Publication date: July 16, 2024

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 5 x 7.5

Page count: 224 Pages

ISBN: 9781566896931

Eugene Lim is the author of the novels The Strangers (Black Square Editions, 2013), Dear Cyborgs (FSG Originals, 2017), and Search History (Coffee House Press, 2022). His writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Baffler, Dazed, Fence, Little Star, Granta, and elsewhere. He is a high school librarian, runs Ellipsis Press, and lives in Queens, New York, with Joanna and Felix.

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A Bookshop.org Most Anticipated Book of 2024

A Reactor Can’t Miss Book of 2024

“The dark dreamlike veracity of Lim’s novel might be remindful of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, Murakami and Auster, but its moving and revelatory insights into the mysteries of human nature are wholly his own.”

—Library Journal, starred review

"Fans of Dear Cyborgs and Search History will be delighted to see the genesis of Lim’s searching and curious style."

—Literary Hub

“Fog & Car’s tale of the aftermath of a divorce, in which its characters’ lives grow increasingly bizarre, demonstrates Lim’s skill at evoking the quotidian and the evocative.”

—Tobias Carroll, Reactor

"No one is writing like Lim. If anything, Lim forces us to articulate how we ask questions of the world—inside and outside literature. How does anyone act in retaliation or defense? How does anyone appraise and evaluate anything at all? How does one live inside this impasse?”

—Shinjini Dey, Cleveland Review of Books

“A tale of lonesome domesticity that transcends into a metaphysical suspense story.”

—Simon Lowe, Full Stop

"Lim's debut is a testament to his literary prowess and his ability to craft stories that linger in the mind long after the final page is turned."

—Shelf Unbound

“Lim’s fans will be happy to see this distinctive early work back in print.”

—Publishers Weekly

"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."

—Lynn Crawford

"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."

—Steve Katz