Vu and the narrator are obsessed with comic books, and Dear Cyborgs is interspersed with the stories of heroes and villains they apparently invent. In one sense, the book is autobiographical, the story of an unnamed narrator and his friend Vu growing up in Ohio, the only Asian Americans in town, “such outcasts that our isolation hardly pained us, as we could barely conceive of the alternative.” Plot is exchanged for ideas, images, and monologues. And Dear Cyborgs, as Lim points out, is not an obvious candidate for a breakthrough.

His two previous novels, Fog & Car (2008) and The Strangers (2013), garnered critical acclaim but remained decidedly out of the mainstream. Lim, a librarian at Hunter College High School, grew up in small-town Ohio and now lives in Queens. I was very happily surprised to get through.” It’s difficult for unusual or innovative books to get through the gatekeepers of New York publishing these days. Small presses in a lot of ways do the main work of literature. “I had written two other novels and been involved in the small-press world, running my own small press, Ellipsis Press. I was very surprised,” Lim, 43, tells the Voice. Jonathan Lethem said the novel blew him away.

The New Yorker and New York magazine were laudatory. “When I say cyborgs, of course I mean us,” Lim writes, laying bare what lies at the crux of his project, an unusual book now drawing the sorts of critical accolades that should vault him into the first rank of American writers. They are not, it turns out, cybernetic crime-fighters or machine killers with human hearts and laser blaster hands. There’s a point in Eugene Lim’s slim, haunting new novel, Dea r Cyborgs, where the cyborgs finally reveal themselves.

Dear Cyborgs by Eugene Lim