29-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Playful Story Collection Unbound From Realism or Form
AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS: Stories, by Ed Park
Fifteen years after his comical debut novel, 'Personal Days,' skewered white-collar work culture in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the writer and editor Ed Park published a second novel that reached beyond mundane office realities.
Inventive, dense and more than 500 pages long, 'Same Bed Different Dreams' was a demanding literary collage of spy and metafiction devices, real and manufactured South Korean and Korean American history, and pop culture. It went on to become a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for its energy, ambition and sly humor.
Now Park's third book is out, a collection called 'An Oral History of Atlantis' whose 16 stories are similarly unbound by run-of-the-mill realism. Like 'Same Bed Different Dreams,' it is a pastiche of forms and nods to genre fiction, from commentaries on campy sci-fi movies to middle-aged dissections of long-gone relationships to indignant epistolary rebukes.
The tales often adopt a knowing, nerd-chic irony. Characters with names like Bethany Blanket and Vernon Bodily are rendered in prose full of writerly self-deprecation and mock hipsterdom:
In Portland my handler, Jonas, took me to lunch at a locavore haunt that featured seafood haggis and artisanal jelly beans.
Park's flash fictions can be capsules of wit. In one, a man lists the antic behaviors of his medicated wife in a series of repeated assertions: 'The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies.' The introductory story, 'A Note to My Translator,' is a critique by a disgruntled novelist of an arbitrary translation of one of his books. His lofty, antiquated diction and ego reminded me instantly of Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's 'Pale Fire':
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