Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Thea Lim
The Real Reason We Hate MFAs
IN THE PARIS REVIEW this year, god of American letters Sarah Schulman said MFA writing programs disserved students if “they were of the wrong class.” Thanks to MFAs, “American literature is filled with repetition . . . there’s no concern about how this repetition undermines democracy.” When I went to Texas in 2009 to do a master of fine arts, I knew of two or three Canadian universities with writing programs.
Abolish the Top Ten Books List
IF YOU EVER HEAR an adult making small talk with a child, I’d wager the conversation revolves around favourites. What’s your favourite colour? What’s your favourite flower? Who’s your favourite Pokémon? When toddlers are acquiring language, we speak to them in our lowest unit of thought: favourites—i.e., ranking, scarcity. The market is the prime organizing force of our lives under capitalism, and its relational logic of good, better, best is our default. Cash rules everything around me.
I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone
TECHNOLOGY / JUNE 2026 I Spent Months with an AI Companion. It Was Worse than Being Alone BY THEA LIM ILLUSTRATION BY JULIANA KOLESOVA Published 6:30, MAY 6, 2026 IN 2003, I LIVED alone in a basement apartment on the Spadina circle. I had moved to Toronto from Singapore, with no family in the city or on the continent. That winter was so cold, the pipes in the laundry room burst and flooded my apartment, and then mushrooms grew out of the carpet.
Thea Lim | The Walrus
The basic premise of our twenty-five-year friendship is that we’re the same, kin among enemies. We had no experience in being opposites
fiction | The Walrus
Sometimes we look younger than we are, sometimes much older, depending on how we’ve chosen to live with what we’ve seen
Canadian Fiction
We ate and drank and drove on and I went off the road, and so we discussed the situation and decided it would be a good idea to pull off the road
Fiction | The Walrus
The basic premise of our twenty-five-year friendship is that we’re the same, kin among enemies. We had no experience in being opposites
short story | The Walrus
We ate and drank and drove on and I went off the road, and so we discussed the situation and decided it would be a good idea to pull off the road
art | The Walrus
My first tattoo looked fine at first, then started to blur. It should be easier to find artists who can work on melanated skin
essay | The Walrus
Nostalgia has always seemed more bitter than sweet to me. But every time I indulge in it, I find it serves a purpose, even if I know I won’t be satisfied
December 2025 | The Walrus
The basic premise of our twenty-five-year friendship is that we’re the same, kin among enemies. We had no experience in being opposites
Anyone Could Be Anyone
FICTION / DECEMBER 2025 Anyone Could Be Anyone BY THEA LIM ART BY PAIGE JUNG Published 6:30, November 28, 2025 PEOPLE THINK private investigators are dirty. They’re oily guys with coffee breath, tattletales. On TV, private eyes cut past curtains with their telephoto lenses, dig in trash cans, stick their hammy hands in underpants drawers. Which is fake, of course. We’re not permitted to record anyone anywhere they have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
My Book Was Stolen by an AI Company. Why Does Suing Them Feel Wrong?
In 2023, a new meme began spreading among authors on Instagram. A screenshot of a search box holds an author’s name; below it, there’s a list of book titles. The author is relaying that each displayed title has been used without permission by a tech company to teach a large language model—or LLM—to speak and think. The captions contain expletives, or paragraphs about corporate greed, or AI’s exorbitant water use. The first wave of these posts came in September of that year.
Small Press, Big Machines, and the Last Run of Canada’s Most Stubborn Publisher
BOOKS / JULY/AUGUST 2025 Small Press, Big Machines, and the Last Run of Canada’s Most Stubborn Publisher BY THEA LIM PHOTOGRAPHY BY THADDEAUS HOLOWINA Published 6:30, June 27, 2025 In 1997, Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield sought to set up a small literary press.
Publishing | The Walrus
The publishing industry is hinging its hopes on a twenty-three-year-old with a Substack and a devout following. Can she deliver?
Monday Reads
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash Happy Monday! Here are some fine reads from around the web, plus what you might have missed from the newsletter and elsewhere this week. Jill Filipovic is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. American democracy is in peril. And racism will be the sledgehammer that destroys itby Kimberlé W.
Ready, Set, Read...All These Great New Essays
Welcome to Memoir Land—a newsletter edited by Sari Botton, now featuring four verticals: Memoir Monday, a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web brought to you by Narratively, The Rumpus, Granta, Guernica, Oldster Magazine, Literary Hub, Orion Magazine, The Walrus, and Electric Literature. Below is this week’s curation. First Person Singular, featuring original personal essays. Recently I published “The Roads She’s Traveled,” by .
11 Time Travel Novels That Will Transport You
Time travel novels have the amazing ability to, well, straddle time. What I mean is, because they feature characters who travel between at least two different time periods, they inherently bring those time periods together. This can be really thought provoking as well as entertaining. This unique ability of time travel novels means that these books either harken back to the past or project into the future (or, sometimes, both).
The Interior Lives of the Transnational Asian Diaspora
Sheung-King’s novel is rooted in a world that is disinterested in the white gaze and imagines a different kind of diasporic fiction. fb tw mail Print msg wa sms Bookmark January 20, 2021 A man sits on a rock overlooking the Taipei 101 tower, once the worlds tallest building, and the Taipei skyline, on the top of Elephant Mountain, 2020. (Photo by Carl Court / Getty Images) In Sheung-King’s You Are Eating an Orange.
The Pandemic Novelist Has Regrets
Still from La Jetée (1962) Last month, I rewatched Outbreak and Contagion. I was searching for the same scab-picking pleasure as everyone else who vaulted them to the Netflix Top 10. Instead, I caught exasperated despair. When Google only brought up articles on how “strikingly realistic” they are, and I discovered even Barry Jenkins likes Contagion, I added to my bad mood that specific irritation of learning no one on the Internet agrees with you. All these films offer is solace for a bygone era.
An Ocean of Minutes
0 Wat vind je van dit boek? Geef jouw beoordeling. 0 0 0 0 0 Willen dit boek lezen 0 Lezen dit boek 0 Hebben dit boek gelezen 1 De Nederlandse Boekenbon is supporter van lezerscommunity Hebban
'People Live Before and After Violence': An Interview with Marlon James
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Bond Street Books), Marlon James’s fourth novel and his follow-up to his Man Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, is a Molotov cocktail through the window of the literary status quo: it’s a fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy, about a group of outsiders who go on a quest, crossing mythical African kingdoms to find a missing boy.
The Scotiabank Giller Prize turns 25
Tamara Martinez explores this year’s shortlisted novels It’s easy to see why the Scotiabank Giller Prize is “the first word in fiction” on the 25th anniversary of the award. As Kamal Al-Solaylee, prominent Canadian journalist and one of this year’s five jury members puts it, “human beings are interested in stories that reflect a personal space, a zone that is visceral. Oral histories, fairytales, and folklore interest human beings.
2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist
People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport. At the orientation, the staff tell them that time travel is just like air travel, you even go to the same facility. People used to be apprehensive about airline travel too. But when you arrive at the airport, it is not the same at all.
Breaking the Barrier: On Race, Gender, and Junot Díaz
A few weeks ago, in the The New York Observer, Nina Burleigh threw down the notion that the enormous success of Junot Díaz’s This Is How You Lose Her is undeserved. Díaz is beloved not because he is a great writer, Burleigh argues, but because Díaz is a man, and a man who delights us with tales about dashing players and their hapless women victims.
Ocean of Minutes A Novel by Thea Lim
Synopses & Reviews Synopsis In the vein of The Time Traveler's Wife and Station Eleven, a sweeping literary love story about two people who are at once mere weeks and many years apart. America is in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic. When Frank catches the virus, his girlfriend Polly will do whatever it takes to save him, even if it means risking everything. She agrees to a radical plan--time travel has been invented in the future to thwart the virus.
In the Temple Basement
Standing in the ladies’ room line, in the temple basement, the woman in front of me said, “I’ve been sitting behind you, admiring your hair.” “Thank you! White for Rosh Hashanah!” I say, and then, “It was a gift from my mother.” I love to say my mother to someone I imagine as a normal person—though who knows. And I love to see cut flowers age—we are cut flowers, when they sever the cord, we begin our dying. She lived to be eighty-five, I needed every hour of it.
Staff Picks: Dubbing and Pill Popping
While watching Dario Argento’s engrossingly decadent, nonsensical, phantasmagoric ballet-school horror film Suspiria at the IFC Center, the scales fell from my eyes.
Five Young Women With Prize-Winning Book Collections
Winner Jessica Jordan’s collection In 2017, Honey & Wax Booksellers established an annual prize for American women book collectors, aged 30 years and younger.
The Prevalence of Ritual: On Romare Bearden’s Projections
Romare Bearden in his Long Island City studio with the photograph of his great-grandparents Henry and Rosa Kennedy on their porch around 1920 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Poetry Rx: Your Naked Back in the Mirror
In our column Poetry Rx, readers write in with a specific emotion, and our resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing the perfect poems to match. This week, Claire Schwartz is on the line. ©Ellis Rosen Dear Poets, My family and I are what the newspaper headlines would deem immigrants. Living in a city where people of my kind are under constant scrutiny and threat has caused me to lose hope.
Paris Review - On Triumph
If done steadily, and with the kind of patience that belies all fear, it is indeed possible to walk the plank backward from the doom of vanishing to that softer, wildflowered field across which mere diminishment winds like a path maybe worth sticking to, finally, for look where the alternatives have led—not that, even now, you regret them, or would, if you believed in regret, if you could understand regret in all of its steepness, the slim shadow it has a way of casting—like a finger at the...
We Are the Subject: Diane Arbus, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Lisette Model
Rosalind Fox Solomon, Seattle, from “Portraits in the Time of AIDS”, 1987 (© Rosalind Fox Solomon.
For the Ugly Ones: The Spiky Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes (Photo © J.F. Paga) Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. — Virginie Despentes, Baise-Moi For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself.
For the Ugly Ones: The Spikey Feminist Anger of Virginie Despentes
Virginie Despentes (Photo © J.F. Paga) Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. — Virginie Despentes, Baise-Moi For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. I would squirm under its gaze and soon close it. I smiled weakly whenever she was mentioned. I was ashamed; I worried my discomfort meant I was not as radical a feminist as I fancied myself.
Trump is a Performance Artist: An Interview With Eileen Myles
Eileen Myles may be the closest thing we have to a celebrity poet. In part, Myles’ stardom can be attributed to the award-winning television show Transparent, in which a queer poet played by Cherry Jones was based on the character of Myles.
Paris Review - Editor’s Note
Welcome, or welcome back. I’m thrilled to share with you the Fall 2018 issue of The Paris Review. As the new editor, I’ve enjoyed spending my first months at the helm assembling this issue, and also getting to know the readers and writers who care so deeply for this institution. Turns out you can make a lot of friends in sixty-five years, and I’m very thankful for the warm reception. Michael S.
Redux: If You Can Hoe Corn for Fifty Cents an Hour …
Every week, the editors ofThe Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.
Paris Review - How I met you
In Nags Head, North Carolina, 1978. Henri Cole lives alone in a small, bright apartment on the top floor of a five-story building in the South End neighborhood of Boston. He works in solitude many hours a day. Cole comes from a family of five children, raised in Virginia. His older brother was a colonel in the Marine Corps; at six feet tall, with his erect bearing, long arms, and capable hands, Cole could be mistaken for a former marine himself.
Because the Story Was Mine
I can’t remember the first time someone asked me what I was. The question has always been a part of my landscape, as common as denim or dirt. Now people ask it of my daughter. The question itself is funny – what are you? – so nonsensical, so naked of etiquette, frenzied to know. Sometimes it’s friendly, a password whispered in front of a door, asking if we are the same. Usually it’s not. I used to try to play games with the question, beat it.
REVIEW: New novel explores time travel and the vitality of love
In Thea Lim’s An Ocean of Minutes, Polly Nader time-travels to the future to work off medical debts for her boyfriend, Frank, who needs a life-saving treatment. She plans to reunite with him after her work as a bonded labourer is done. However, Polly is rerouted an additional five years, and the book alternates between Polly’s relationship with Frank in the past and her present search for him.
New Book Releases, Bestsellers, Author Info and more at Simon & Schuster
Gilded Age Intelligent, witty, and poignant, Gilded Age presents a modern Edith Wharton heroine—dramatically beautiful, socially prominent, and just a bit unconventional—whose return to the hothouse of Cleveland society revives rivalries, raises eyebrows, and reveals the tender vulnerabilities of a woman struggling to reconcile her desire for independence and her need for love. eBook List Price $11.99 (price may vary by retailer)
An Ocean of Minutes
In the fall of 1981, a flu pandemic sweeps across the United States, primarily infecting people in the south. Polly and Frank are vacationing in Texas from New York when Frank falls sick. Far from home, frightened and unable to afford the medical treatment, Polly decides to embark on a radical path to save Frank’s life. She signs on with the Rebuild America Time Travel Initiative and agrees to two years of bonded labor for TimeRaiser in the future in exchange for the treatment.
Thea Lim’s An Ocean Of Minutes tells intensely human story
TORONTO — “People wishing to time travel go to Houston Intercontinental Airport..” That’s how Thea Lim wanted to begin her ambitious new novel, An Ocean of Minutes. But she also suspected she was letting herself in for a heap of trouble by choosing science fiction as the prism for the book she wanted to write. She had more on her mind than just a love story. An Ocean Of Minutes is also a cautionary tale about the perils of a global economy. So writing it was no picnic. “It was terrible.
Writers’ Fridges: Ottessa Moshfegh
In our series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. Do you see that half-eaten can of tuna on the top shelf? That was a mistake. Most of the food in my fridge is inedible. It would be inedible even if the stink of tuna hadn’t penetrated through it all, because it’s old. I’m almost never at home in Los Angeles, where this fridge lives. I travel a lot, and when I’m in California, I go to Luke’s house, two hours away.
An Ocean of Minutes
Toronto resident Thea Lim’s debut novel is a dystopian time-travel story that defies genre conventions by concentrating on the interpersonal consequences of its plot. But somewhere along the line the narrative falls flat: despite the author’s best attempts, the reader feels no attachment to the characters. As a result, it’s difficult to root for their success.
The reluctant romantic
I didn’t set out to write a love story. In fact, I was startled when my agents Karolina Sutton and Lucy Morris chose to position my book as a love story. I said, are you sure it isn’t migrant literature disguised as time travel? Or a disquisition on the passage of time, wrapped in a mystery? But they pointed out it was the love story held all these elements together. I had tricked myself into writing a romance.
Thea Lim: How it begins
Donna likes to remind Polly that she has to earn her keep, by entertaining Donna. “You’re such a drag,” Donna says. “Go do something daring so I can live vicariously.” Polly prefers to stay home and drink home-brew wine and watch TV with Donna’s two massive cats, Chicken and Noodles. “What happened today?” Donna yells as a way of greeting, when Polly comes home. “Gossip! If you don’t give me some gossip, you’re getting kicked to the curb!” “We did some training on the new in-house phone system.
Shelf-Love: Thea Lim
Thea Lim is a name you may have heard before, and if you haven’t, well, you will start to notice it cropping up all over the place. She isn’t a newcomer to the writing scene, having contributed to publications The Guardian and Salon, but with the June 2018 release of her debut novel, you can find her on must-read lists right between Canadian heavy-hitters, like Michael Ondaatje and Miriam Toews.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Thea
Contact Thea, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack