While the old saw has it that you should never judge a book by its cover, Ed Park’s collection of short stories is fronted by a vision that reflects its contents, and might have come from a mordant disaster flick: The Statue of Liberty appears piecemeal in lava-lamp-like blobs, with only her uplifted torch appearing above the risen waters of New York Harbor.
Liberty drowning under swollen, overheated oceans — what could be more 2025?
You can find out tomorrow evening, when novelist Ed Park (Personal Days, Same Bed Different Dreams) launches his short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, at McNally Jackson Seaport. In these 16 tales, you’ll meet such characters as Tabitha (“Bring on the Dancing Horses”), who “reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world.” The LOL “A Note to My Translator” recalls Nabakov’s Pale Fire through the exasperation of a profoundly misinterpreted author:
I understand that “French” is an obscure and obsolete tongue, but we must have something like standards, yes? To go along with some of your suggestions (not to mention your outright, brazen, unnoted blunders) would be akin to an automobile manufacturer issuing cars with only one tire, and that one deflated, and no brakes to speak of. To wit:
Page one: The novel begins with a hailing of the muse and a quick history of man’s moral awakening, mastery of his surroundings, and subsequent fall from grace. In my version.
In your version, a man named Mr. Henry enters a flat in London and discovers that his wife is taking stomach medication. You go on to say that it is raining outside and that an oblong (?) Quaker youth is on a “hickey spree.”…
Page seven: Who is Solomon Eveready? What is he doing in my book?
…
Page eight, a little lower down: The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball.
Page nine: Solomon Eveready reappears, this time smoking cut-grade reefer and imitating a trout. Explain this to me. Explain also the presence of scuba gear that “reeks of melon.”
Page ten: Only ten pages into my novel and already all seems lost. I no longer recognize characters, points of plot, dialogue.
I frankly have no idea what the words before me mean. Here you present a heated argument between two nuns (and are they truly robot nuns?), both of whom speak a weird amalgam of Cantonese and the International Morse Code. Can you help me? Please?
We are, to use another hoary saying, cursed to live in interesting times, and Park’s characters achieve sympathetic vibrations with the angst of our ludicrous — but profoundly dangerous — epoch.
Tomorrow night, Park (whose Same Bed Different Dreams was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize) will be joined by Rachel Aviv, who was once his intern when he was a razor-penned editor here at the Voice, lo these many years ago. Aviv, whose articles since becoming a staff writer at the New Yorker in 2013 have included “The German Experiment that Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles” and the recent “Mary Had Schizophrenia — Then Suddenly She Didn’t,” will no doubt prove well-suited to discuss a collection that includes “The Wife on Ambien,” in which the title character “knows the score. I mean this literally. Rangers 4-3 in overtime. Devils fall to the Flames, 3-1. Knicks lose again at home. In the morning I open the paper and none of this checks out.”
Like we said, what could be more 2025? ❖
If you miss Park’s book launch at McNally Jackson Seaport tomorrow night, you can still catch him here:
September 4: Yu & Me at The Korea Society, with Mira Jacob
