[{"id":276842,"date":"2026-09-10T10:22:06","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T14:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276842"},"modified":"2026-09-10T10:22:06","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T14:22:06","slug":"on-ed-parks-personal-days-one-of-the-best-comic-novels-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-ed-parks-personal-days-one-of-the-best-comic-novels-of-all-time\/","title":{"rendered":"On Ed Park\u2019s Personal Days<\/em>, one of the best comic novels of all time."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the first installment of an ongoing series recommending books from what I’ll call the Funny Novel Canon. Think of it as a working syllabus for literary humorists. If there’s a funny novel you love and think should be included in future installments, email me\u2014nicely please!<\/em><\/p>\n

Ed Park is a great writer, and his work is always smart and ambitiously challenging in form and structure\u2014see his love of H.S. Keeler\u2019s \u201cweb-work\u201d<\/a>. His latest book, Three Tenses<\/a><\/em>, a well as his Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams<\/em><\/a>, are complex without resorting to gimmicks or cheap obfuscation that implies depth. Park is a genuinely creative writer, who continues to challenge himself to try something new.<\/p>\n

But Park\u2019s writing is also tremendously funny. (Full disclosure, we wrote a McSweeney\u2019s piece together<\/a> so I\u2019m not exactly unbiased.) Some of Park\u2019s funniest writing is in his collection of short pieces, An Oral History of Atlantis<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> but his first novel, Personal Days<\/em><\/a>, is one of my favorite comic novels of all time.<\/p>\n

Personal Days<\/em> follows a group of office workers who spend their days in the Manhattan offices of a mysterious company with murky goals. Nobody seems to work much, though, the employees are consumed by gossip, crushes, and confusion about their coworkers, superiors, and others who lurk in their building.<\/p>\n

The plot roughly follows a central mystery about the company, but this book is memorable for being extremely funny\u2014Park is going for jokes. Personal Days<\/em> is full of wordplay, dry observations, and weird specifics, and none of it feels tacked on or forced. Coworkers spin up absurd theories about each other, and this setting\u2014the office as the most fertile breeding ground for speculation\u2014allows Park\u2019s absurdities to bend plausibility without breaking it.<\/p>\n

The wordplay is especially well done, which will come as no surprise if you\u2019ve read Park\u2019s work before. His funny turns of phrase and memorable names get a lot of laughs, but they\u2019re working at a deeper level too. The homonyms and mishearing are folded into the plot, which turns at a few instances on wordplay and puns.<\/p>\n

Like all funny writers, Park is attentive to form, and uses headers and other formal shifts to get in little jokes and control his pacing. I won\u2019t spoil it, but the book also takes a big turn in the last section using a really fun, formal constraint. It’s a wonderful combination of sitcom and Oulipo.<\/p>\n

What I love most about this novel is that it’s funny in ways that only writing can be. Too often, humorous novels find comedy by mimicking the things that film and TV do, relying on writing that often feels like transcriptions from the screen. Park takes a different route, relying on jokes and situations that can only happen on the page, which makes Personal Days<\/i> a very special novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first installment of an ongoing series recommending books from what I’ll call the Funny Novel Canon. Think of it as a working syllabus for literary humorists. If there’s a funny novel you love and think should be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17056,"featured_media":276848,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43201,43092,43646],"tags":[7693,112240,4820,105400],"class_list":["post-276842","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-news-newsandculture","category-newsandculture","category-the-hub","tag-ed-park","tag-funny-novel-canon","tag-humor","tag-personal-days"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a1c","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/personal-days-computer.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17056"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276835,"date":"2026-09-10T06:30:37","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T10:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276835"},"modified":"2026-09-10T09:17:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T13:17:12","slug":"lit-hub-daily-september-10-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-september-10-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: September 10, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1886, H.D. is born. <\/span>\n