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Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties
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Expected 11 Aug 26Win a free print copy of this book!
7 days and 17:39:13
50 copies available
U.S. only
An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams
In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.
The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.
Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.
In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.
The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.
Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
224 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication August 11, 2026
About the author
Ed Park
40 books36.2k followersI'm the author of the forthcoming memoir THREE TENSES: A TRANSMISSION FROM THE NINETIES (August 2026)—preorder it now!
My novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature.
My debut novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.
AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, a collection of stories written over 25 years, was longlisted for the PEN Faulkner Award and appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists, including those of Time, Booklist, NPR, and the Boston Globe.
What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and elsewhere. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some recent pieces.)
THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS, a work of weird horror, will appear later this year.
NB, I am *not* the author of THE WORLD OF THE OTTER, by the late nature writer Ed Park, but it's worth picking up if you see a copy (and like otters).
My novel SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature.
My debut novel, PERSONAL DAYS (2008), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian American Literary Award, and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize.
AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, a collection of stories written over 25 years, was longlisted for the PEN Faulkner Award and appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists, including those of Time, Booklist, NPR, and the Boston Globe.
What else? I'm a founding editor of THE BELIEVER, and I've written for The Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and elsewhere. (Check out ed-park.com or https://linktr.ee/edpark for some recent pieces.)
THE REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS, a work of weird horror, will appear later this year.
NB, I am *not* the author of THE WORLD OF THE OTTER, by the late nature writer Ed Park, but it's worth picking up if you see a copy (and like otters).
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 3, 2026
The best memoir I ever wrote!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced copy of this book, that looks at a life trying to find itself, a path that takes the writer around the world, making and creating experiences, real and imaginary, told in snippets that jump from place, time, true and fictional
I am not a fan of memoirs. Mostly because I know that memory is not only fallible, but can be used to protect oneself from the reality we find ourselves in. Like Homer Simpson looking into a mirror, and seeing a muscular image, instead of, well Homer Simpson. I know I Star Wars in 1977, I am sure that it was on Father's Day, and my Dad and I saw it together. Seeing the movie is true, the Father's Day might not be, and I lack the courage to find if Star Wars was even playing in Connecticut in June of 1977. However that is my story and I am sticking to it. Memory can fill in the blanks when needed, like the brain helping out an lazy eye, compensating for weakness by working harder. Another thing about memories is looking back can be humbling. If I was to see the person I was in the nineties, I would probably be equally embarrassed and disgusted. Though I say that for the person I was in 2025. Ed Park is far braver than I am. And a much better writer. Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties by Ed Park is a work of memoir, rememberance, biography of creative, fiction and a little more, a look at an artist who wanted to grab the world, was surprised when the world grabbed back, and the moments that made up his life.
COVID was rough for many. For Ed Park it was suddenly finding himself in a smaller place than expected, with a spouse working from home, and children learning by Zoom. Park had a small office and here he found tucked away a manuscript from the far past of the 1990's. A work of biography thought lost to floppy disk irrelevance, but typed up and saved to the cloud of today. The book is a work of fiction and nonfiction, told in almost snippets or tiles. Tiles that can be moved around through time, space, even confidence levels. This is the portrait of an artist as a roamer, with bits in Korea and New York and other places both real and imagined. Books are discussed, love is found, confused, maybe lost, maybe never even really started. Park writes, reads, watches movies, and writes some more. Slowly the tiles merge, a pattern seems to appear, but things get a little lost again. Just like life.
I still remember, and this is a true memory Park's Same Bed Different Dreams and being blown away by the concept the writing and the ideas. A book I continue to push on customers and friends, and an author I really look forward to. This is no exception. At first I thought I was lost, but I soon found a rhythm to the writing. A mix of real moments and imaginary ideas. Autofiction with a bit of Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique tossed in. Park is a really good write, and even in snippets creates sentences that are better than most books. One gets the feel of a young wordsmith finding there way, that pretension that fills so many early pages, but with nuggets still showing amidst the word salad. There is a sense of distance not just from the setting the 1990's, but because of all the countries Park travelled to. New York is not like Korea, and the writing reflects that also.
A challenging book, and maybe not the best one to go to people hey you have to read this. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and found myself just hitting random pages on my ereader. Park is so good at creating small moments, moments that resonate even after the book is closed. Capturing ideas, feelings, emotions, and even the confusion of entering a world that has never really been revealed. A book a quite enjoyed, and one that I know I will be flipping through again. I look forward to what Ed Park has planned next.
I am not a fan of memoirs. Mostly because I know that memory is not only fallible, but can be used to protect oneself from the reality we find ourselves in. Like Homer Simpson looking into a mirror, and seeing a muscular image, instead of, well Homer Simpson. I know I Star Wars in 1977, I am sure that it was on Father's Day, and my Dad and I saw it together. Seeing the movie is true, the Father's Day might not be, and I lack the courage to find if Star Wars was even playing in Connecticut in June of 1977. However that is my story and I am sticking to it. Memory can fill in the blanks when needed, like the brain helping out an lazy eye, compensating for weakness by working harder. Another thing about memories is looking back can be humbling. If I was to see the person I was in the nineties, I would probably be equally embarrassed and disgusted. Though I say that for the person I was in 2025. Ed Park is far braver than I am. And a much better writer. Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties by Ed Park is a work of memoir, rememberance, biography of creative, fiction and a little more, a look at an artist who wanted to grab the world, was surprised when the world grabbed back, and the moments that made up his life.
COVID was rough for many. For Ed Park it was suddenly finding himself in a smaller place than expected, with a spouse working from home, and children learning by Zoom. Park had a small office and here he found tucked away a manuscript from the far past of the 1990's. A work of biography thought lost to floppy disk irrelevance, but typed up and saved to the cloud of today. The book is a work of fiction and nonfiction, told in almost snippets or tiles. Tiles that can be moved around through time, space, even confidence levels. This is the portrait of an artist as a roamer, with bits in Korea and New York and other places both real and imagined. Books are discussed, love is found, confused, maybe lost, maybe never even really started. Park writes, reads, watches movies, and writes some more. Slowly the tiles merge, a pattern seems to appear, but things get a little lost again. Just like life.
I still remember, and this is a true memory Park's Same Bed Different Dreams and being blown away by the concept the writing and the ideas. A book I continue to push on customers and friends, and an author I really look forward to. This is no exception. At first I thought I was lost, but I soon found a rhythm to the writing. A mix of real moments and imaginary ideas. Autofiction with a bit of Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique tossed in. Park is a really good write, and even in snippets creates sentences that are better than most books. One gets the feel of a young wordsmith finding there way, that pretension that fills so many early pages, but with nuggets still showing amidst the word salad. There is a sense of distance not just from the setting the 1990's, but because of all the countries Park travelled to. New York is not like Korea, and the writing reflects that also.
A challenging book, and maybe not the best one to go to people hey you have to read this. I enjoyed it quite a lot, and found myself just hitting random pages on my ereader. Park is so good at creating small moments, moments that resonate even after the book is closed. Capturing ideas, feelings, emotions, and even the confusion of entering a world that has never really been revealed. A book a quite enjoyed, and one that I know I will be flipping through again. I look forward to what Ed Park has planned next.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Ed Park’s Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties is the kind of literary self-indulgence that will either remind readers why they love books or frustrate them almost immediately.
Personally, I found myself moving along that spectrum throughout the reading experience, with intrigue dissipating into irritation.
If you don’t know the premise of Three Tenses, it’s an author exhuming his personal archive. During COVID, Ed Park found a draft of a memoir that he had written decades before his literary career took off and decided to publish it. It’s easy to see why Park was fascinated by his own writing, but like many COVID-era projects, it feels marked by stale insularity.
Three Tenses is filled with scattershot, aphoristic posturings akin to Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, all of which are unified only by globe-spanning references to where they were written. These are the musings of a twenty-something who desperately hoped one of them would stick, but to what end? It’s a tough sell to engage with a “starving artist” gorging himself on the world, and it’s even harder to care when these locations are named purely to add some world-weary credibility to the esoteric stonerisms you'd find in any graduate school writing seminar. For example, look at how Park-the-Younger overworks a half-formed thought below:
Sigh. And this is as much context as any of the one-liners receive.
If my criticism sounds harsh, it’s only because Park is an exceptional writer now, and his clarity of voice and vision anchors his more abstract sensibilities. It’s a novelty to see his writing before it was anything special, but to appreciate it, one has to fully accept a tiresome level of self-mythology. It feels like a writer asserting and overseeing his own canonization (or self-flagellation), and it’s a dull distraction from his other, wonderful books.
I’m glad Ed Park has Three Tenses, but for the rest of us, it could have stayed in just one—the past.
My thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the ARC!
Personally, I found myself moving along that spectrum throughout the reading experience, with intrigue dissipating into irritation.
If you don’t know the premise of Three Tenses, it’s an author exhuming his personal archive. During COVID, Ed Park found a draft of a memoir that he had written decades before his literary career took off and decided to publish it. It’s easy to see why Park was fascinated by his own writing, but like many COVID-era projects, it feels marked by stale insularity.
Three Tenses is filled with scattershot, aphoristic posturings akin to Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, all of which are unified only by globe-spanning references to where they were written. These are the musings of a twenty-something who desperately hoped one of them would stick, but to what end? It’s a tough sell to engage with a “starving artist” gorging himself on the world, and it’s even harder to care when these locations are named purely to add some world-weary credibility to the esoteric stonerisms you'd find in any graduate school writing seminar. For example, look at how Park-the-Younger overworks a half-formed thought below:
“In New Haven, he says that you can’t call it the Orient. You can’t call it Asia. These are Eurocentric terms. In fact you shouldn’t refer to it at all—it doesn’t exist except as an imperialist or mercantile artifact. But for practical purposes, she argues, it needs a name. He suggests writing the mathematical symbol for null set.”
Sigh. And this is as much context as any of the one-liners receive.
If my criticism sounds harsh, it’s only because Park is an exceptional writer now, and his clarity of voice and vision anchors his more abstract sensibilities. It’s a novelty to see his writing before it was anything special, but to appreciate it, one has to fully accept a tiresome level of self-mythology. It feels like a writer asserting and overseeing his own canonization (or self-flagellation), and it’s a dull distraction from his other, wonderful books.
I’m glad Ed Park has Three Tenses, but for the rest of us, it could have stayed in just one—the past.
My thanks to NetGalley & Random House for the ARC!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thanks to Random House (Will Lyman) and NetGalley for the egalley of Three Tenses.
Ed Park's Three Tenses is an odd duck of a book. Although Park calls it a memoir (he should know), I think he does the book a disservice by doing so. Three Tenses is truly its own beast. There should be a description for what this book is (Memory Mosaic? Cerebral Collage?), but I guess the problem becomes where to shelve the book, so a memoir it is.
In my mind, Three Tenses is essentially a writer's notebook crammed with musings, observations, one-liners, anecdotes, historical information, quotes from books, family history, lover's angst, travelogue, gossip, etc., all given a specific writerly shape by beginning each one with the word In. This gives each of the sections the authority of its placement within the larger text, identifies it as a puzzle piece of the much larger image. And although it is very possible to read each small section as a sort of stand-alone observation or anecdote (one feels that the book can be opened at any page for a quick hit of wit), the continued reading of the text demonstrates the interconnectedness of the pieces. There are echoes throughout the text: images, locations, references, people appear haphazardly but are recalled from pages before. It may not feel that important, but the frequency of the recollections is enough that their significance escalates, their meaning deepens. It is from this coalescing that the bigger image starts to form, which is Ed Park. Never fully, though, since this isn't that kind of memoir (because it's a writer's notebook), but enough that you get a sense of who he is at this time: a struggling writer trying to get by and yet have the best life he can have. Work sucks, life sucks, but there are moments of beauty and almost transcendence.
Three Tenses is a difficult book to recommend because of its uniqueness, although I think writers in particular would find it entertaining and useful for reading another way to structure narrative. Being called a memoir, as I said, won't help either because it fails to truly capture the unique, almost experimental nature of what Park has created. If you are a reader who likes to read books that kind of push the edge of storytelling, Three Tenses is the book for you.
Ed Park's Three Tenses is an odd duck of a book. Although Park calls it a memoir (he should know), I think he does the book a disservice by doing so. Three Tenses is truly its own beast. There should be a description for what this book is (Memory Mosaic? Cerebral Collage?), but I guess the problem becomes where to shelve the book, so a memoir it is.
In my mind, Three Tenses is essentially a writer's notebook crammed with musings, observations, one-liners, anecdotes, historical information, quotes from books, family history, lover's angst, travelogue, gossip, etc., all given a specific writerly shape by beginning each one with the word In. This gives each of the sections the authority of its placement within the larger text, identifies it as a puzzle piece of the much larger image. And although it is very possible to read each small section as a sort of stand-alone observation or anecdote (one feels that the book can be opened at any page for a quick hit of wit), the continued reading of the text demonstrates the interconnectedness of the pieces. There are echoes throughout the text: images, locations, references, people appear haphazardly but are recalled from pages before. It may not feel that important, but the frequency of the recollections is enough that their significance escalates, their meaning deepens. It is from this coalescing that the bigger image starts to form, which is Ed Park. Never fully, though, since this isn't that kind of memoir (because it's a writer's notebook), but enough that you get a sense of who he is at this time: a struggling writer trying to get by and yet have the best life he can have. Work sucks, life sucks, but there are moments of beauty and almost transcendence.
Three Tenses is a difficult book to recommend because of its uniqueness, although I think writers in particular would find it entertaining and useful for reading another way to structure narrative. Being called a memoir, as I said, won't help either because it fails to truly capture the unique, almost experimental nature of what Park has created. If you are a reader who likes to read books that kind of push the edge of storytelling, Three Tenses is the book for you.
Read
July 7, 2026Part memoir, part fever dream. You can’t really explain this book. When I started it, I have to admit, I was a little bummed. It is written in short little snippets. BUT, then I just leaned in and I went for the ride. I’m glad I did. The “snippets” are like microchapters, perfect for the short-chapter lover like me.
I liked the references to NY and Buffalo, they felt pretty familiar to me. Ed Park is an incredible writer, if he writes it I’ll read it. This book isn’t for everyone. Overall, I don’t suggest making this your first book by him. Go read Same Bed Different Dreams!
Thank you to Ed Park, Netgalley and Random House for the early eCopy!
I liked the references to NY and Buffalo, they felt pretty familiar to me. Ed Park is an incredible writer, if he writes it I’ll read it. This book isn’t for everyone. Overall, I don’t suggest making this your first book by him. Go read Same Bed Different Dreams!
Thank you to Ed Park, Netgalley and Random House for the early eCopy!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews