Ed Park's Blog

“To speak of Park’s creativity is also to speak of his humanity—empathy is a function of the imagination, of course, and it makes sense that a mind capable of dreaming these worlds and sisterverses would also be able to endow them with spirits as vivid and complex as our own. It’s dazzling, this steady carousel of delight and stunned awe. Park is one of the funniest writers working today, and among the most humane.” —Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author of Martyr!

“The James Joyce of Korean-American literature, and of our times.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife

“An Oral History of Atlantis is a snapshot of who we are and where we are, as well as an offbeat map to where we might dare to go. The stories are mordant, inventive, heartbreaking, and above all else, profoundly human, and I’m already looking forward to a re-read.” —Paul Tremblay, New York Times–bestselling author of Horror Movie and A Head Full of Ghosts

“Ed Park is a magician of storytelling. These stories explore the multiplicity of time and space—artistic, historical, and psychological—and confront once and again the shapeshifting border between reality and unreality. With sly humor and deep understanding, Park makes the reader laugh from disquiet, and tear up from being seen.” —Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday’s Child

“What’s the collective noun for a school of stories so bright and brilliant, they ripple with humor, compassion, and wonder? Call them an ‘Ed Park.’ An Oral History of Atlantis will continue to delight us, long after the flood.”
—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“Funny, tragic, winsome screwball science-fiction prose poetry of ‘maximum lexical density’ that’s pure pleasure to read.”
—Sarah Manguso, author of Liars

“Realism may still command the heights of American fiction, but insurgents are in it to win it. With titans such as Pynchon and DeLillo in their late 80s, now comes a generation captained by Ed Park…After the ornate sprawl of the novel, he revels in the shorter form, a palpable joy on the page. Irony has never had it so good.” —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times

“Exuberant…These are comedies of embarrassment, but happily there is no embarrassment to the comedy, no leavening of the gags and witticisms with serious issues. It is easy to become demoralized by American fiction, which sometimes seems to be exclusively tailored to celebrity book clubs. But to read [Park] is to find a literary scene in a state of rude health.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

Happy to see this starred review from Library Journal:

"Park’s startlingly original and nearly plotless stories repeatedly disrupt readers’ imaginations. A focus on narrative kicks off the collection, quickly settling into mood and quirky observation. In the opening story, an author writes to his novel’s translator to complain that he has mistranslated everything and added characters, situations, and objects to the book that aren’t in the original. In another tale, a writer invents an app that alters his novel’s text as the audience reads it—there’s no returning to the original. A third bibliocentric story features a woman who spends seven years polishing one paragraph of text, then refuses to let it be published. The longest story is a dialogue between a director and an actress as they record a Blu-ray commentary track for a B-movie epic in which she plays Lt. Carapace of the 124th Interstellar Battalion. There’s also a tale narrated by Tina, who lives on an island with 17 other women named Tina. Park’s antecedents are writers like Julio Cortazar and David Markson, which is high praise."

"In his new story collection, Park, the author of two approachably surreal novels, sends his reader on a set of mind-opening trips, drawing absurd connections and inventing wacky situations: A narrator’s girlfriend insists on wearing a 'housecoat' at home—a 'sort of down-filled poncho with stirrups'; a man turns on his laptop one day to see his ex-wife walking across the screen. These oddball scenarios may make you laugh, but they can just as easily have you questioning your place in the universe. In 'Machine City,' an undergrad is fascinated by meta works of art—books within books, smaller paintings depicted within larger ones. He wonders whether the 'interior' work is less authentic than the one in which it’s embedded. And if a painting can contain a painter painting another painting, 'could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God?' He can’t stop asking himself these kinds of questions, which won’t help him get into law school. Even when Park writes about mundane experiences—his stories chronicle time spent online, on college campuses, and in post-divorce apartments—he is taking us someplace new." — Maya Chung

I was happy to see this lovely review of AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS today in PW:

Across these subtly interconnected stories, Park (Same Bed Different Dreams) crafts a world animated by pulp fiction and space operas as much as by the mundane joys and sorrows of modern relationships. In the opener, “A Note to My Translator,” the author of a novel titled Mexican Fruitcake decries the dadaist liberties taken by a translator with his hard-boiled prose. Such gems as the unnamed narrator’s complaint that “the doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball” set the tone for the tongue-in-cheek humor that suffuses the collection. “Bring on the Dancing Horses” is narrated by a man who grows increasingly jealous when his girlfriend, a literary critic specializing in science fiction, develops a bond with the FedEx courier who regularly delivers review copies and who turns out to be a gifted writer of speculative fiction. “Seven Women” comprises sketches of women whose fates revolve around Hannah Hahn, the elusive but “legendary” editor of a cult literary journal from the late 1980s, including Hannah’s stepmother, Dr. Emma Chew, “a revered psychoanalyst in her day.” The name Hannah appears in several entries, including the stellar “Weird Menace,” a transcript of a conversation between an actress and her director as they rewatch their low-budget sci-fi B movie turned cult classic decades later. Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time.

Look for AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, our 7/29! I'll be doing events in NYC and some other cities.

Exciting news—the paperback version of SBDD is out now, available at your favorite stores and online.

And if you're in New York City, come to the launch event on Thursday, November 21 at 7 pm. I'll be in conversation with Ava Chin, author of the acclaimed nonfiction book MOTT STREET.

The fantastic Yu & Me Books will be hosting the event at New Design High School at 350 Grand St.

More information (and free RSVP) here.

The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. I was preparing for my class, but tuned in a bit after 3 p.m. Fiction was the last category announced, and to my delight, .Same Bed Different Dreams. was named as one of the three finalists! The judging committee called it "an inventive postmodern novel that moves from the brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula to a lonely Korean American boy’s passion for the Buffalo Sabres, [told in] interlinked narratives that jump historical and imaginary time zones with humor, sorrow and irreverence."

What a thrill! The other finalists were Yiyun Li's .Wednesday's Child. and Jayne Anne Phillips's .Night Watch., with the prize going to the latter.

On Friday morning, I flew to L.A. for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ceremony. SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS had been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. I didn't know who the winner was. At a reception before the event, I saw my friend Elizabeth McKenzie, whose wonderful, hilarious novel THE DOG OF THE NORTH (a tip of the hat to Portis's THE DOG OF THE SOUTH) was also an LAT finalist. We were bussed to the auditorium. The place filled up. There were many categories — poetry, history, science fiction, mystery, audiobook production, and more. Fiction was the last award announced.

When my name was announced as the winner, I was pretty stunned. I was so honored, grateful that the judges had truly understand the book, inside and out. I will never forget it.

SBDD is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize in fiction! Wish me luck! https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...

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Alexander Chee, novelist and author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, has written an incredible review of SBDD for The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/17845...

He has many fascinating insights and makes great connections, including linking SBDD to my first novel, Personal Days. Here's his take on PD:

As a novelist, Ed Park did not seem so concerned with history, at first. His debut, Personal Days (2008), was a wry and piercing office novel that captured the ambient paranoia in the lives of co-workers at an anonymous American company, hanging on to their positions as employees are fired and laid off, in a world bounded by the Good Starbucks and the Bad Starbucks, and shaped by phrases like Help me help you and The evaluations would remain anonymous. The first section of the novel uses a first-person plural narrator to unforgettable effect, and a 48-page, single-sentence final chapter is written as an email and hints at the ambition and scale of the art to come.

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I was on Wisconsin Public Radio's BETA, talking about SBDD: https://www.wpr.org/books/novelist-ed...

It's been approximately 2 million years since I've posted, but I thought I'd mention this for any audiobook fans out there: Late last year, the NYT Book Review named SBDD one of the five best audiobooks of the year! For some reason, the piece only came out in the paper, so it wasn't easy to share. Anyway — to my surprise, the audiobook review (by Lauren Christensen) popped up online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/bo..., with some wonderfully loopy artwork. Here's what Christensen writes:

Intertwining the very real past of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground government and a far-reaching parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”

But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the varied narrative prowess of the audiobook’s three narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the narrative signposts we can get in this vertiginous maze that winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.

Park’s novel braids together three separate narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American employee of a fictional technology conglomerate called GLOAT who becomes obsessed with an unfinished manuscript that mysteriously falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of supposed nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive/real/a restaurant deliveryman; Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black Korean War veteran and former P.O.W. living in Buffalo. Characters, too, repeat throughout, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they came.

That’s OK; the point isn’t to grasp every minute detail, pinning it to your mental bulletin board with thumbtacks and a network of strings. The fun in this audiobook comes not from solving the riddles of the past, but from the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life collide headfirst into heartfelt and hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life.

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My initial book tour wrapped up in January, but I'm still doing about an event a month for the near future. I'll be at UC Irvine on Tuesday, February 20, and at Harvard's Korea Institute on Monday, March 4. For more information, go to my website, https://ed-park.com.

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Also, I've enjoyed writing the occasional TinyLetter, but that service is shutting down. Should I do a Substack? Mailchimp? Call it a day?

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Hope everyone's doing okay. Thanks for reading!
Ed