Latest news with #EdPark
Washington Post
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
These bold stories capture the strangeness of digital identity
Both chronologically and stylistically, the writer Ed Park feels quintessentially Gen X. Obsessed with authenticity, technology, and questions of family and loneliness, he seems both fascinated and repulsed by these changing times. In his first collection of short stories, 'An Oral History of Atlantis,' Park interrogates the tension between digital representation and the real, the translated and the untranslated, the metaphorical and the literal. Lost films, found texts, Borgesian mysteries, past loves, domestic fractures, gnawing loneliness and online avatars all occur and recur, collectively assembling into something of a Parkian expanded universe. Vacillating between quasi-memoiristic first-person and bold experimentation, Park — a co-founder of the Believer and the author of the novel 'Same Bed Different Dreams,' a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — asks how we might cope in an era when existence appears inexorably split between the material and the digital.
New York Times
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': Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
