Ed Park Can’t Stop Thinking About Zabar’s Strudel

Ed Park’s novel, An Oral History of Atlantis, is available now from Random House, so we asked him a few questions about writing routines, favorite characters, rereading, and more.

*

What time of day do you write?
I’m a morning writer. The brain feels fresher; sometimes there’s dream residue that suggests a fresh development in an ongoing work, or a new story altogether. In fact, what I’m writing currently—part of a novel—initially stemmed from a particularly vivid dream last fall.

The pages got augmented more recently with another dream, involving a horrible creature that was biting my leg….

Which of your characters is your favorite?
This book of stories has many different narrators, all of whom reflect me to some degree, but I feel closest to the mysterious Miriam, who narrates both “Seven Women” (a heptad of loosely related portraits) and the spy story “Watch Your Step.” She also figured in a third story (“Thought and Memory”), narrated by someone else.

Gender and eccentricities aside (she has two pet ravens, e.g.), some of her life mirrors mine, particularly the time she spent living in Seoul in the early ’90s. Also, she’s fixated on the strudel from Zabar’s, much like yours truly.

Which book(s) do you reread?
I am eternally dipping into the world of Charles Portis (especially The Dog of the South and True Grit), Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyöng. Sebald, too—mainly The Rings of Saturn. Lately I am losing myself again in the Samguk Yusa, a thirteenth-century collection of ancient Korean lore.

I recently reread The Catcher in the Rye and Breakfast of Champions. I didn’t fully grasp the depths of sadness in both when I encountered them as a young reader.

What book has elicited the most intense emotional reaction from you?
Almost any random Wodehouse collection (Mulliner Nights, say) reliably makes me laugh.

The scariest book I read recently was Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, from 1895. The first chapter is a mad-scientist scenario that feels dated, with rather questionable science. But then the structure keeps shifting, much like the terror at the center of the story.

I don’t want to say too much, but the queasy climax is a master class in describing the indescribable.

What is your favorite book to give as a gift?
The novels Turtle Diary (1975), by Russell Hoban, and Afternoon Men (1929), by Anthony Powell—and not just because I’ve written introductions to the newest reissues (from New York Review Books and University of Chicago Press, respectively).

The first is about two solitary, wryly articulate people in London who, quite separately, wonder what it would be like to free the sea turtles in the zoo—then join forces to make it happen. Hoban has somehow turned a meditation on urban loneliness into a heist story.

Powell’s novel—his first—is the quintessential portrait of bright (or not-so-bright) young things between the wars. More importantly, the humor still crackles today. I think about lines from it a lot, such as the description of one character: “the aura of journalism’s lower slopes hung round him like a vapor.”

Or how about this bit of party chatter: “Then there’s a woman whose surname I can never remember. Her Christian name is Jennifer. You won’t like her. I don’t like her myself.”

______________________________

An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park is available via Random House.