“My girlfriend, Tabby,” says a narrator from Ed Park’s new story collection, “reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world.”
Welp. I’m not even reviewing Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis, but writing—obliquely—about him writing it, which puts me sub-Tabby on the fantastic spectrum of American futility. I’m fine with that, because Park is precisely the sort of person you’d want to talk craft with. A bibliophile who can scarcely write a single page of prose without mentioning someone else’s novel—often sci-fi, often invented—he utilizes self-reference to absurd, slapstick peaks rarely matched in contemporary fiction. It’s not turtles on turtles, it’s books on books.
Park says he’s been into “art within art” since college, when Jorge Luis Borges and the surrealist painter René Magritte hit him “like a thunderclap.” This reverberation echoed through his alternate Korean history Same Bed, Different Dreams (a 2024 Pulitzer finalist) as it links the 16 pieces in An Oral History of Atlantis. One of the collection’s characters—a Yale undergrad named Ed—even writes a paper on Magritte, saying, “I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it… Was the interior work of art less ‘real’ than the surrounding work? If so, why does our mind attribute levels of reality to what is, after all, just color on canvas? Since a painter can paint a painter painting a painting, could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God? Pondering such things probably wouldn’t help me get into law school, but I couldn’t stop.”
Park is a ponderer; An Oral History of Atlantis is a concentrated stockpile of musings. The earliest story here comes from way back in 1998. The title piece, though it reads like COVID-era dystopia, was written shortly before 9/11. “I’ve written more than 16 stories over the years,” Park says with a grin. “But a lot of them didn’t quite get the vibe. These ones, they seem to be communicating with each other.”
He’s right, in that certain motifs—science fiction, the modern publishing industry, music—thread the collection from front to back. But the stories themselves are a blur of style and wordcount, from quick-hitting screwball humor (“The wife on Ambien tries to order Ambien on Amazon.”) to Saundersesque metafiction (“Page seven: Who is Solomon Eveready? What is he doing in my book?”). The longest piece is a Blu-Ray commentary written out in dual columns, a sort of distant cousin to Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad PowerPoint chapter.
I wondered how Park conceived such disparate works. Was it like ice fishing, shivering in an idea-less shanty and waiting for a bite? Or did it more resemble standing in a batter’s cage, taking a bunch of swings, missing some, clipping others, trying not to get smacked in the face?
“Some of these are basically one-concept stories,” says Park in response. “Those are gifts, right? Like, I get the idea and I can write it pretty quickly, in a way that I enjoy.”
But gifts are just that. A writer can only expect so many of them. Park says other stories simmer for a while and leak out onto the page in a kind of authorial reminiscing. “I don’t think I’d ever written a fiction story set at Yale,” he says of his alma mater and the aforementioned “Machine City,” published in The Baffler in April 2024. “But it felt like I had Yale in the background for years, never touching it. And then one morning I’m like, wait, I’ve got to write about this. And once I had the idea there, I could just keep remembering stuff.” In place of active brainstorming, Park says, “There’s just moments where a sentence will come to mind, or a situation. A story can unfold pretty rapidly from that.”
Finally there are pieces, like the Blu-ray commentary, driven by the framing device itself, for example a letter from an author to his terrible translator (Park: “I was thinking Nabokovian”), or a series of seven rapid-fire, interlocking character vignettes, a form borrowed from the English Author Max Beerbohm. Park has always tried to take advantage of “subliterary” writing. Letters, rants, lists. “It’s not a fixed thing,” he says of such forms. “It’s ephemeral.”
As for finishing the pieces he begins, Park says, “I always try to. But some stories I’ll have maybe half a page and keep it around for years. I think that’s always a good idea. Because time can pass and suddenly I’ll have the same idea again and think, oh, let me look at that stub that I started five years ago. And I’ll find something that I enjoy.”
Seeing stories to their end is something that Park does not for publishing’s sake—“that feels a little out of my hands”—but for completion and, often, performance. He wrote some of this collection for public readings around New York, which he’s long taken part in as an editor and a teacher. “In my mind, those invitations let me try something new,” Park says. “It’s like a vacation from working on a novel. And for those, I usually write with an audience in mind. My title, An Oral History of Atlantis, reflects that a lot of these were read aloud.”
Park has always tried to take advantage of “subliterary” writing. Letters, rants, lists. “It’s not a fixed thing,” he says of such forms. “It’s ephemeral.”It’s rather paradoxical that I should grill Park about craft, because his story “The Gift” proposes a general inscrutability in teaching or learning about writing. “The Gift” features one Professor Dublinski—“hottest prof three years running,” reports the campus rag—whose Fundamentals of Aphorism course is a survey in quasi-philosophical gobbledygook. “All true aphorisms aspire to anonymity. They are the only gifts to civilization.”
Like any eccentric modernist, Dublinski inspires some and frustrates most. His methods are, let’s say, questionable. “This story dates back to 2012,” says Park. “I had done some teaching back then. It’s a bit of an academic satire. But some of the teachers I had when I was younger, I still think about them. They were professional writers, and you kind of hung on their every word. I do wonder if something I might have gotten from them was just spur of the moment, and I’ve taken it as gospel.”
Park now lives on the other side of that equation. “Who knows,” he says. “When I teach workshops, I’m talking a lot. Maybe something I’ve said that I might not even remember, a student 10 years down the road will say, you know, I’ve always liked that. Or, I always thought that was utter bullshit.”
Across the publicly traded Zoom æther, this is essentially what I’m doing: gathering scraps, forming ideas, ice fishing in the frozen lake of Ed Park’s mind, taking a batting cage session with him as the machine. My last round of questions, particularly useless, equally American, involves the bewildering cultural cache that Park throws into his work. Some examples from this collection: De La Soul cassingles; the Jesus and Mary Chain; Elvis Costello (“widely considered to be one of our most gifted songwriters”); a 1913 art history book called The Gothic Image; another cassette tape, this time the Pet Shop Boys’ Behaviour; the Rod Stewart Song “Young Turks”; a Civil War chess set that, when viewed sideways, spells out “GOLFNUT”.
How much is too much, is more or less what I’m trying to clear up. Does some of it get edited in or out after the fact? Is there a gigantic dial that Park rolls up and down, sort of like, let me try one, the tone control knob on a discontinued 1956 Fender Harvard?
“I came up with ‘De La Soul cassingles’ on my first draft,” says Park (not at all defensive about it). “But yes, in going over a draft, I think there probably is a bit of dialing up or down, with that specific level of consumer and pop culture.” The granularity here mirrors Park’s obsession with science fiction, a detail-oriented genre if ever there were. He often dives deep to summarize concepts involving vast worldbuilding and new-age technology. “I want to partake of science fiction without being science fiction,” he says, which sounds circular but tracks when you read Park’s work. “The De La Soul cassingles thing is sort of on the same wavelength.”
De La Soul tapes and “Zongan” technology, René Magritte and “hallucinogenic seaweed”—there’s a method to the madness here if one looks closely. But that risks overinterpretation. Park wrote much of An Oral History of Atlantis for humor, saying that short stories are “funnier per line, per paragraph,” than novels in order to keep a reader’s or a listener’s attention. Park’s overall aesthetic is perhaps best described by words that came from his own hand, a description of some work by a mysterious Kindle-hacking author named Rolph:
Every selection I came across was brilliant… and completely unlike any other part I’d seen. I had no idea how it would all hang together, even though I was privy to Rolph’s obscure architectural strategies and what he called his “ongoing hissy fit aimed at traditional narrative.” Basically, he longed for a text that wasn’t set in stone, something more akin to a living organism—a story with free will. He didn’t like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.
