CANR

• Interview - https://www.interviewmagazine.com/literature/gabriel-bump-and-ed-park-compare-notes-on-their-new-novels

  Gabriel Bump and Ed Park
  Compare Notes on Their New Novels
  By Ed Park
  December 20, 2023
  facebook share twutter share email share
  Gabriel Bump
  The author Gabriel Bump, photographed by Lauren Christensen.

  Gabriel Bump’s sophomore novel The New Naturals is a book about a utopia that doesn’t fully deal with utopia: mourning the loss of her newborn child, Rio, a young Black woman living in Western Massachusetts comes across an abandoned restaurant just off the highway. She becomes fixated on the idea of a safe haven, an equitable world that would grant anyone love, acceptance and opportunity and an honest education in history. After convincing her husband to aid her in constructing an underground society (and securing a sympathetic benefactor), she sets out to execute her vision. “It’s no surprise that this utopia doesn’t work out,” Bump joked over Zoom with fellow novelist Ed Park, who’s just completed his own sophomore novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, his first book in fifteen years. “Once this utopia came into existence, I knew it was going to fail, and then it was fun.” In his novel, Park imagines an alternative history in which the Korean Provisional Government [KPG] still exists and is working toward a unified nation by mysterious means. Shortly after both their books were released, the writers found numerous overlaps in their personal lives and careers, one being the city of Buffalo. After a period of emotional and professional turmoil, Bump eventually rented a room in a Buffalo, where Park was born and raised, to settle down and complete his novel. A few weeks ago, the two talked about the Sabres and the start-and-stop processes by which their novels came to be.—EMILY SANDSTROM

  ———

  ED PARK: Good to finally see you in something like real life, Gabe.

  GABRIEL BUMP: Thanks so much for agreeing to do this.

  PARK: So actually, the reason I’m slightly late is that I just finished it.

  BUMP: [Laughs] Oh, really?

  PARK: One of the great things about it is, I didn’t know what to expect. At every turn, new characters come up, but as I moved onto the last 30 pages or so I kept being surprised. That last short chapter left me gasping. I really take my hat off to you.

  BUMP: Well, thanks. The ending was always going to be the ending. It’s no surprise that this utopia doesn’t work out. Some things go wrong, and what does go wrong might be surprising. As I really got going, once this utopia came into existence, I knew it was going to fail, and then it was fun.

  PARK: Right.

  BUMP: I’m really curious where your book started with you. Which was the first thread that you had that was like, “I think this is going to turn into a novel”?

  PARK: The first thing I wrote, which is now the second chapter, is the first long scene, the dinner party in New York. It’s an Asian literary publishing art scene type of party, for the visiting Korean author named Echo, who’s about to be translated and published in America. It had already been several years since my first novel [Personal Days] came out in 2008. I had been writing stories and I was assembling them into a collection. Then one day I was alone, taking a little break from family life, and I was writing on a typewriter, which sometimes I do just to do, especially when I don’t know what I’m doing. And this scene just came to me. It was like I was throwing a little party in my mind. I kept writing from that scene for a really long time. Then the more historical bits, which in the book are called “dreams,” came in around year five.

  BUMP: At what stage of the first draft is year five?

  PARK: I had written a full draft in first person, as the narrator Soon Sheen, and just kept going. There was this realization that it was kind of superficial. I had encountered a novel called Big Bang, this very unconventional historical novel by a writer named David Bowman. I read it and I was like, “This is such a great approach to historical fiction,” and it made me want to do something like that with parts of Korean and American history. Later I realized this all should be in the same book. I want to ask you a variation of that question. Which characters spoke to you first, and how did you think to introduce them? We start with Rio, and later we’re getting characters like Sojourner and Bounds, but they all seem to be coming from different places.

  BUMP: Well, it was interesting to hear you talk about your process because I think that the inverse happened to me. It started out with these small moments and they just started blossoming outward. The ideas stage was bigger. It involved this, “How can I deal with this idea of utopia?” I was in Western Massachusetts at the time and I was driving, around fall of 2017. I had just sold my first book, Everywhere You Don’t Belong. There was a second book in the deal, and it was always called The New Naturals in my head. The first thing I wrote for this book was a scene with Bounce and Sojourner. I had Bounce trying to cook breakfast and he keeps messing it up. In the earlier drafts, he’s burning everything, the eggs, the toast, he’s setting off the fire alarm. They give up and just drink a beer.

  PARK: I could relate to that scene. I’m not a good cook. I feel like we’re talking about utopia, and there are serious themes in this book, and tragedies, but it’s also so funny.

  BUMP: That is where the book started, in those tiny failures. Then I started working backwards: Who is Sojourner, who is Bounce? And then, where? I knew they found this utopia somewhere, they just kind of stumbled upon it. Then it’s like, “Who is running this thing?” That’s how I got to Rio. Then, Elting and Buchanan, these homeless guys in Chicago, were the second to last thing to go. They’re kind of solely there for comic relief and philosophizing, just this back and forth.

  PARK: It reminded me of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or Mercier and Camier, these two… not fools, but they do provide this kind of comic relief in the form of their dialogue and the way they address other people.

  BUMP: Yeah. The final part was The Benefactor. I wanted to try to make this person sympathetic, and try to understand people’s motivations. That’s why this book does end up being surprising, because it’s a book about utopia that isn’t really about utopia.

  PARK: It’s kind of perverse in that way–in a good way. Utopia as a literary theme is so hard to write about convincingly, or in a way that feels fresh.

  BUMP: I am curious how you latched onto this idea of the KPG [Korean Provisional Government]. Because the whole idea of political movements are inherently based around the idea of utopia: How do we create a society that we want and works for everybody?

  PARK: So, in 1919 there was something called the Korean Provisional Government that was formed to tell the world about what was happening in Korea, how Japan had colonized it. In reality, they didn’t really have much power, it was sort of conceptual. They had a headquarters outside of Korea in Shanghai, but the president, Syngman Rhee, was living in the U.S. already. It was this notion that they wanted to reclaim Korea. I remember reading that in a history book and I just filled it away for almost 25 years. For the book’s purposes, I allowed myself to dream a little bit in terms of, “What if the KPG was still around? Is utopia, for me or for other Korean diaspora people, a unified Korean peninsula?”

  BUMP: In your book we come back to the Buffalo Sabres a lot. Why were you in Buffalo, what was going on there?

  PARK: I grew up playing and watching hockey and filled myself with Sabres lore. You spent a little time in Buffalo, so you know how dearly people think of their teams, but also how heartbreaking it can be. When the Sabres were eliminated from the Stanley Cup Finals in ’99, everybody was saying, “It’s no goal.” Brett Hull’s goal didn’t count, because his foot was in the crease, and that was against the rules. Back around ’99, maybe immediately after, I wrote this sentence like, “What else could be unresolved?” I had that sentence hanging out in my head for 14, 15, 16 years. Then, as I was writing this book about Korea, I was like, “What happens if we put that sentence in?” The next book will be more about the Bulls, I think.

  BUMP: Since my first book was a real Chicago novel, there’s this one scene, and there’s no other reason for it to be in the story besides that I love the Bulls, where the father finds out that Michael Jordan’s coming back. He goes and sprints into Lake Michigan overcome with joy. I knew if I was going to write something, I wanted to put in that kind of moment.

  PARK: Yeah, the emotional connection to sports, connection to your hometown team. Maybe by putting it into a book, you’re trying to convey some of that genuine unquenchable ardor for your hometown teams. Can we talk about why you were in Buffalo?

  BUMP: This book was mainly written in Buffalo. Maybe there’s a few things going on here. One is that this book can read kind of sad, because I was in this dark moment in my life. I wasn’t doing well, I was feeling alone. I sold my books and it was this thing that I had worked for most of my adult life towards, and it didn’t fix any of my problems.

  PARK: I hear you.

  BUMP: One day I was in Western Mass driving west on 90, and Buffalo is about maybe seven-and-a-half, eight hours away from Amherst. I stopped there at some Marriott, not even in the city. I stayed there for a couple of days to get my bearings and then went to Chicago. I was sleeping on my friend’s couches and staying at home. I was like, “I don’t feel like being here, I don’t feel like being home, I don’t feel like going out,” because all my friends and family are there. I didn’t want to explain how I was feeling to people that I knew, if that makes sense.

  PARK: It totally makes sense.

  BUMP: I was like, “Where else can I go?” I had some cash for my advance, and I remembered that I really liked those two days I spent in Buffalo. So I moved there, and in this really sad state I rented an apartment above a coffee shop in a new multipurpose building on Elmwood. I would wake up in the morning and go running and then I would go to this coffee shop to work on this book. I thought this would be the last thing I’d do with my life, it was at that stage. I’m sure people have felt this, especially artists, where you’re like, “Life doesn’t seem to be working, but I know I like writing. So let me finish this book that I have to do.” As I was writing, life started feeling better. I feel like it shows in the book; people start feeling better, even though nothing is fixed. My book doesn’t really have this sweet, happy ending, but we kind of know where everybody is at the end.

  PARK: It’s almost like the book was working on you, right?

  BUMP: Yeah.

  PARK: When I was younger and wasn’t married yet, I lived on 83rd Street near Amsterdam. I was working at The Village Voice and I would sit down with a coffee and just write. Not to romanticize it too much, but there’s something really good for the soul about writing in places like that. And I’m very happy that you wrote most of The New Naturals in Buffalo.

  BUMP: I think there is something to be said about Buffalo. The Buffalo sections in Same Bed Different Dreams adds this sense of real heart and emotion. Maybe because it’s so small and contained, while simultaneously being packed, filled with emotion, with sadness, maybe some frustration. When I was reading your book I was like, “I really like these sections, these characters. Is it just Ed? Is it Buffalo? Is it just me thinking about Buffalo?”

  PARK: Maybe it’s a little bit of everything. Obviously I was born and raised there, but I haven’t lived there in a long time so maybe my memory is putting a glowing haze over the whole thing. There was something that I tried to bring into the book that was pulling from that experience.

  BUMP: How does it feel to have your second novel out?

  PARK: It feels great. It’s been so long, and I feel like a lifetime has passed by, but I think it was worth it. Over the years, part of me would get frustrated and say, “Everybody else who was writing around the same time, they have all these books out, and you’re just starting things and abandoning them.” There was a realization that the book needed to encompass all of these things. Once I realized it should be on that scale, I was able to figure out how to write it.

  BUMP: It sounded like in the early attempts to get this book going, you said you were writing through threads that weren’t really working. We’re all really grateful that you didn’t abandon this, but why didn’t you?

  PARK: I think it’s partly ego, that I didn’t want to confess to myself and others that I threw away three, four, however many years doing this thing that didn’t work. I wanted to mention Bounce and Aviere, because when they’re first talking it gave me so much pleasure. I felt like you were so accurate in depicting what it’s like talking to a child. I could have read this dialogue for 30 pages. Your book encompasses so many emotions. And partly, it’s the humor that hooked me and kept me in it.

  BUMP: Thank you. I feel the same about your book. I think because the characters are in different emotional stages, they’re interacting with the world in different ways. One of the really fun things about writing a wrenching book is showing how these people are operating in the world. Through those tiny interactions you can really see them improve and come to some better understanding of self and of the world. I don’t think I’ll ever write a book with this many characters again. It’s going to be in the first-person from here on out.

  PARK: Me too. We’ve got a deal.

• New York Review - https://www.nybooks.com/online/2021/10/30/a-good-story-to-tell/

  A Good Story to Tell
  Ed Park, interviewed by Sable Gravesandy and Anacaona Rodriguez Martinez
  “As an editor, I liked it when writers opened my eyes to their passions, however obscure they might seem. As a writer, I want to do the same.”
  October 30, 2021

  Ed Park, 2018

  Facebook
  Twitter
  Mail to
  Print page
  This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past ones here and sign up for our email newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week.

  In The New York Review’s October 21, 2021 issue, Ed Park reviews a new selection of works by the Korean modernist writer Yi Sang. An avant-garde poet, story writer, visual artist, and architect, Yi Sang was born in 1910, just after Korea became a Japanese colony, and died at the age of twenty-six. In his essay, Park writes about Yi Sang’s short life, his legacy, and how the writing of this “enigmatic outlaw and culture hero…crystallizes the anxiety of Korea under Japanese rule in the first half of the twentieth century.”

  The author of the 2008 novel Personal Days, Park is also a journalist, a former executive editor at Penguin Press, and a founding editor of The Believer. As a writer and editor, Park defines both vocations as being about “discovery and enthusiasm,” working to entice readers into a new world. “As an editor, I liked it when writers opened my eyes to their passions, however obscure they might seem,” he told us via e-mail this week. “As a writer, I think I want to do the same thing.” Park, therefore, attempts to recreate the same feeling of “surprise and delight” in his editors and readers, consistently aiming to “tell a good story.”

  It is with this mantra that Park links his fiction and nonfiction writing. Telling a good story may be “obvious when it comes to fiction,” he says. “But I try to do the same in articles and reviews—locate a plot and follow through.” When we asked him about his recent reviews of Yi Sang’s books for the Review and the Netflix drama Squid Game for The New Yorker, and the challenges that come with reviewing different types of art, Park explained:

  The basic approaches are the same. You definitely have to know the history and context of a given medium or genre. In addition to fiction and (in the case of Yi Sang) poetry, I’ve been doing a regular column for The New York Times Book Review on graphic novels, which have their own rich tradition, their own movements and mavericks.

  Really, I am a fan of so many different art forms and would love to write about them all. At this point, it’s an issue of not having enough time to take everything in.

  Although Park has been working in publishing and journalism for years, he admits to occasionally having difficulty knowing where he stands. When discussing the attention in his recent work to a uniquely Korean-American experience, as opposed to the generic immigrant narratives American literature has just begun to depart from, Park says he has not yet resolved where he belongs within this cultural evolution.

  “I’ve been writing for a long time now, fiction and nonfiction, and it can be hard to sense what changes have taken place in literary culture, and where exactly I fit in,” he said. “I should add that most of my stories over the years haven’t been about Asians or Koreans, though lately I seem to be writing more things along those lines.” Park explains that while he does not want ethnic identity to limit his scope, the opportunity to explore these topics does have a “deeper resonance” for him. Despite there being more high-profile Asian-American writers today, he is still often “the only visibly Asian name in a magazine’s table of contents,” he noted. “I suppose as a writer and an editor, it’s been meaningful having my name out there for such a long time. It’s not a very long name—maybe I should have gone with “Edward” from the start—but perhaps it means something to somebody.”

  Park’s interest in Korean history and culture was largely inspired by his parents: “Having been born in America, I’ve always been curious about my parents’ lives before they came here in the late 1960s. This fascination has only increased as I’ve gotten older.” Park’s father, a retired psychiatrist in Buffalo, often acts as a cultural bridge for him. Occasionally his father will look for Korean articles online to help him with his research. “I like to joke that he’s my research assistant,” he said. His father’s knowledge also came in handy for Park’s review of Yi Sang in the Review. “I was reading the new Selected Works and other translations, but I’d occasionally bounce a couple versions off of him.”

  Here, Park’s father made an intriguing discovery in the translation:

  My dad looked at one of Yi Sang’s infamous “Crow’s Eye View” poems for me—the one with a backward grid of numbers. According to my father, the Chinese characters that Yi Sang used to write “that’s all”—right before his signature at the end of the poem—would have been pronounced, in Korean, as “yi sang.” These aren’t the same characters he used to write his pen name, to be clear, but they sound the same—a further doubling or mirroring at the end of a poem that’s a grid of backward (mirrored) numbers. My admiration for Yi Sang itself doubled upon learning this.

  Park’s admiration began twenty years ago, when he discovered Yi Sang’s work in Myong Hee Kim’s translations. “I found it so puzzling and strange,” he said. “I liked the total weirdness of it, and was fascinated by the wild, brief life that he lived.” For Park, each of Yi Sang’s works demonstrates a different side of him: “For someone who lived such a short life, he seemed positively oceanic, limitless. How to make sense of such an artist?” The Selected Works, especially, helped Park understand Yi Sang’s career as an architect: “The more I read, the more fleshed out he became,” he said, and his fascination goes beyond literary appreciation alone. The poignancy of Yi Sang’s early death from tuberculosis, he realizes, had also exerted “a pull on me over the years.” As he recalls in a footnote to his review, Park’s paternal grandmother had also died of TB, just a year after Yi Sang did.

  Advertisement

  Park now has a second novel in the works, Same Bed, Different Dreams (a title taken from an old Korean saying), but we wondered how he now viewed the central concern of his 2008 fiction debut—the intimate details of officer-workers’ anxious lives—in light of today’s pandemic-related remote-working environment. “Despite the inevitable time-capsule vibe [of Personal Days],” said Park, “the basic human story of people brought together by the happenstance of employment still rings true, even in today’s more WFH-friendly world.”

• BOMB - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2023/12/15/ed-park-david-gordon/

  WINTER 2024 ISSUE
  INTERVIEW
  Ed Park by David Gordon
  For his long-anticipated second novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, Park used a bewildering blend of reality, imagination, and humor to depict a “secret history” of Korea.
  DECEMBER 15, 2023
  Cover of Ed Park's novel Same Bed Different Dreams on top of an old map of Korea.
  SHARE
  Ed Park is best known as the author of the novel Personal Days (2008), as well as the cofounder of The Believer and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, but that barely scratches the surface. Among other roles, he edited the Poetry Foundation website, wrote a sci-fi column for the Los Angeles Times, and reviewed graphic novels for the New York Times. I can’t think of anyone else qualified to do all of that, as well as write DVD notes for Rosemary’s Baby, deeply researched pieces on Korean avant-garde poet Yi Sang, and more.

  I first met Ed when he began editing my novel Mystery Girl (2013). I was nervous about working with someone new, but our mutual friend, Rivka Galchen, told me that we would love each other. We met at a diner for breakfast and immediately began an intense conversation that has lasted for more than a decade. During that whole time, I knew he was working on a second novel. We’d be discussing places to submit our stories or nerding out about Stanley Kubrick documentaries, and then I’d tactfully bring it up, this unfinished megabook. I worried that Ed would become one of those neurotic geniuses who conceives a masterpiece they can never complete, unearthed years later in some basement. Then, finally, I heard it was done.

  Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) is wildly ambitious, brilliantly conceived, funny, sad, moving, an attempt to grapple with both personal history and History, told and untold, real and dreamed. Briefly and breathlessly, the novel concerns a Korean American writer, Soon Sheen—a husband and dad working in upstate New York for a vast Google-like empire named GLOAT— who attends a literary party one night and, while blackout drunk, is slipped a manuscript written by Echo, a mysterious and legendary Korean writer. The manuscript, which functions as a novel within the novel, details “the dreams” of the Korean Provisional Government, a shadow society that struggles, first for Korean independence during the Japanese occupation, and now for unification, in a sense secretly continuing the Korean War. This sets off a swirling vortex of narrative threads—some true, some invented—that pulls in assassins, poets, K-pop idols, horror movies, sci-fi writers, UFOs, and cults, as well as a deep excavation of life and love in our very strange times. I met Ed at Metro Diner in New York City to discuss not only the book but its epic coming to be.

  1066 Black and white portrait of the author.
  Photo by Sylvia Plachy.

  David Gordon
  I was a couple blocks away when I realized that this is where I met the girl who ended up being a model for a character in one of my novels.

  Ed Park
  So you know this place. The Beastie Boys played one of their first shows upstairs. It says that on the back of the menu.

  DG
  Oh, whoa. Well, after remembering that I met somebody in this diner twenty years ago, the first question I want to ask is—

  Waiter
  Are you ready to order?

  DG
  Do you want to eat something?

  EP
  Could we just talk for a little bit?

  DG
  (to waiter) Yeah, we’re going to order something in about twenty minutes, let’s say. (waiter leaves)

  So, I’m wondering how far back the beginnings of Same Bed Different Dreams go.

  EP
  I started the long first chapter, the one set at a Korean restaurant called the Admiral Yi, in the summer of 2014. As I kept writing, certain obsessions, often things I’d written about earlier in other forms, found their way into the book. For example, this nonexistent hockey player for the Buffalo Sabres, Taro Tsujimoto. I wrote about him for a nonfiction class at Columbia University thirty years ago—a memoiristic piece about playing hockey as a kid in Buffalo and this strange joke played by the Sabres front office for the ’74 draft. But the fiction part of my brain was like, What if he had really existed? So certain elements in the novel go back decades. Another example: in college, I took a Korean language class in which we translated a famous poem, Kim Sowol’s “Azaleas.” A few years later, news came out that North Korea was building a nuclear facility at Yongbyon, the same place mentioned in Kim’s heartbreaking poem. I wrote an essay about it, never published it, but nothing ever goes to waste. “Azaleas” and the nuclear stuff found their way into the book.

  DG
  The character of the psychiatrist who moved from Korea to Buffalo seems to be modeled on your father.

  EP
  He’s in there, in fictionalized form. Many of the milestones are the same—his birth, his move to Seoul from a region now in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, the student protests in 1960, moving to Buffalo, and so on. My father was a teenager during the Korean War—about the age my sons are now. So I think about them, think about him. Long ago he told me a story about how he and some other friends were rounded up—they didn’t know why. It turned out that the North Korean army was forcing these kids to join them. This was in the south, near Seoul. That story was seared into my head, because if he had been taken away, I wouldn’t exist. I would not have been living in Buffalo, playing hockey and going to the movies. I put it in the book, of course.

  DG
  Creative work can come from anywhere, right? Things that happened when you were three years old can suddenly come up. I think that’s especially true with a novel because it’s bigger by nature, and it has more room between the lines for things to seep in. This novel, in particular, is fascinating to me, because it’s a big ambitious book that pulls together so many strands of history and experience and culture, but also I know that the process of actually writing it took up a big chunk of your life.

  EP
  To say the least! Nine years of working on it is also nine years out of my life. It’s a book about history that actually takes up a lot of my personal history. I was moving forward while reaching backward into my past for material. Soon Sheen, one of the main narrators, is sort of a version of me—same age, Korean, et cetera—and his presence meant that events that left an impression on me in the ’80s or ’90s could logically belong among his memories, too.

  DG
  In many ways, Soon Sheen is the nerve center of the novel—but I don’t feel like that’s necessarily true, either. Did you start out with a story about Soon?

  EP
  Writing that big initial dinner party scene at the Admiral Yi, I had Soon’s voice coming in loud and strong. He was enough like me that it felt natural, but with major biographical differences that made me stretch my imagination. I thought I’d keep going with that voice for the whole book. Years into the process, when the novel was hundreds of pages long and seemed to stall, I blew it up. I took six of my favorite Soon-narrated chapters and pretended I’d never written the rest.

  One issue that was holding me back was that I’d introduced Echo early on—this notorious, brilliant Korean novelist, dubbed the Scourge of Seoul. Was it enough to say his writing is great? I tried to summarize novels that he wrote, but that seemed to flatten him. I thought, Maybe I need to actually include some of his genius writing—but how?

  Around year five, I read David Bowman’s Big Bang, his posthumous novel about American cultural history, which doesn’t have a main character but has an unstoppable voice that I’d call Close American Omniscient. It knocked me out. I suddenly wanted to do that with Korean history—to explain interesting episodes in Korean history to people who might know nothing about it—which is most readers, honestly. So I started writing these notes that had some kind of narrative force behind them. Stylistically, they weren’t similar to Bowman, save that every brief episode had to be fascinating. I could feel myself straying from Same Bed, writing a different book. I had this eureka moment when I realized that whatever I was jotting down didn’t have to be a separate project—I was like, This should be the book that Echo writes! And that’s how I found myself writing a second novel to go inside the first one. It’s like my unconscious had to trick myself into thinking it was doing something else.

  To return to your earlier point, Same Bed Different Dreams took up a lot of my history, and then it became about history. But I don’t think that would have happened had it not taken so long.

  Support BOMB’s mission to deliver the artist’s voice.
  DONATE
  SUBSCRIBE
  DG
  It makes me think about reading Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time is a durational work of art. You’re reading about these people, about their entire lives, and meanwhile probably nine or ten months have passed while you’re reading. By then, your life is in a different place, you know?

  EP
  My corollary to that is Anthony Powell. I’m a big fan of his, and he was deeply influenced by Proust. Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is composed of twelve short novels, written over thirty years and covering over half a century. It took me so long to read that the books started molding how I perceived my own life. It was also a direct influence on that first party scene—Powell does these great party scenes—where the reader rapidly meets all these interesting people.

  DG
  I sometimes think about the different types of novels. The most obvious would be a very plot-driven novel, sci-fi or heist novels or whatever. Then there are voice novels—which are often people’s favorites—like a John Fante book, or Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, or J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. But with a voice novel, there is a danger of it just running out of gas. Some kind of plot has to kick in. For a lot of writers, they’ll just add a love story, right? But you actually added a whole other category of novel, what some people would call a systems novel, but which I tend to think of as a design novel, where there’s a formal idea that almost takes the place of a plot. Like with James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, the formal idea generates its own necessities.

  EP
  I’m very conscious of the systems novel, but “design novel” is a better term for what I was doing. I should briefly explain the parts of the book. There’s the Soon Sheen narrative, taking place over a few months in 2016. Then there is Same Bed, Different Dreams, with a comma in the title—the book within a book, Echo’s unfinished novel. There are five Dreams, written in the first-person plural, the communal voice of the Korean Provisional Government. There was something oracular and secret and even sinister to the Dreams. I realized that these sections could be about how Korea presented itself in American history and pop culture. I included people who really were members of the KPG, like Syngman Rhee, and others whose membership I invented, like Marilyn Monroe. It was tremendously freeing.

  And then weaving around the Soon sections and the Dream sections is a third thread, which initially focuses on Parker Jotter, a science fiction writer and Korean War vet in Buffalo. As it moves through the decades, the baton gets passed down to other characters. Every chapter is in a different style, and we encounter some of the folks we’ve met in the modern-day Soon Sheen thread, but in different contexts.

  Waiter
  Would you like more coffee?

  DG
  Yes, please.

  The challenge of writing a character with a super engaging voice like Soon’s is that readers might just want to stay with that character.

  EP
  It’s a big risk! But I’m also making a deal with the reader. If they’ve trusted me so far, the hope is that they’ll take a gamble on these other threads.

  DG
  It’s almost a sleight of hand that you have to pull off or risk losing the reader’s focus.

  EP
  It’s not just that the line-by-line writing has to be engaging, but also a question of how much variation in narrative form readers can take. By the time they’re a third of the way through, they can hopefully sense the overall design.

  DG
  All of these synchronicities, these historical connections and coincidences, come together in Same Bed. Did you forge the connections, or did you stumble across them?

  EP
  A little bit of both. There were times when I knew where some of the overlaps would be, but they were usually not predetermined. It was as though my enthusiasm for a particular section or historical figure would lead into these fortuitous connections.

  DG
  One of the amazing things about this book is that the creative process—the thinking and reading and research you did for years—becomes the weave of the book itself. You’re engaging with your own unconscious, as well as history and odd connections in the real world.

  EP
  Right! Like the name “Sabre.” The Sabre was a jet flown during the Korean War. And I’m a longtime Buffalo Sabres fan—how might I connect the hockey team with the fighter jet? There’s no real connection, but in a novel, there can be. And I remembered a line I used in yet another abandoned story, this one from the ’90s. It was going to be a time-travel story. It started, “I believe that the Korean War never ended, just as I believe that the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals, between the Buffalo Sabres and the Dallas Stars, remains unfinished until this day.” I used a version of that line to start Dream Four.

  A different sort of example. I used to share a writing office with the crime author Ed Lin. He’s a UFO buff, and the office was filled with magazines and books about the phenomenon. One was called Advanced Aerial Devices Reported During the Korean War. The cover had a photo of an F-86, with a hand-drawn UFO off to the side. Just looking at this, I knew I had to figure out how to put it in the book. And bit by bit I dreamed up Parker Jotter as a Korean War vet who flew a Sabre. One morning, he goes in pursuit of a massive, mysterious aircraft, which leads to his capture by the North Koreans. I thought that later, after the war, he might become a science fiction writer. It became a whole new, third thread to the novel.

  DG
  It creates a weird feeling of uncanniness in the reader because there’s this idea of a secret history that will be exposed from all these random bits that nobody else would ever connect. It makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, where he gathered all these scraps of information about Paris, old clippings, quotes, bits of ephemera, and fitted them together to reveal this hidden truth of history. Same Bed is not just a kind of private digging into one’s own unconscious or childhood to make art. It’s also a secret history itself.

  EP
  Even at the start, I knew I was going to delve into whatever Korea means to me as well as whatever my own history, my lifetime, means to me. Where I grew up in Buffalo, most people didn’t really know what Korea was. I had to piece it together from my parents’ lives, from glimpses in the news and on TV. This was in the ’70s and ’80s. The Blizzard of ’77 had made Buffalo synonymous with bad weather, and the city was pretty depressed. But I also felt a great connection to it. I liked learning about its history. Millard Fillmore and Grover Cleveland were both from Buffalo. And William McKinley was shot there, an event I put in the book.

  DG
  Was there a Korean community of any size?

  EP
  It was small compared to New York City or Los Angeles, but it was pretty tight-knit. My cousins lived nearby, and I had a bunch of Korean friends, some of whom I’m still in touch with. But my family only visited Korea once, and in general we were pretty cut off from what was happening there. Mostly I was trying to assimilate, but of course you never really do. I didn’t know of any Korean American novels growing up. No Korean movies, no K-dramas. And this was very pre-internet, so only the really big news broke through and was consumable by me. I remember that right after Park Chung Hee [president of South Korea] was assassinated in 1979, I had a hockey game, and a teammate asked if we were related. I explained that Park was a pretty popular Korean name. But I liked that he was paying attention to current events!

  It’s not unconnected to writing Same Bed, or what I’ve always felt was tricky about trying to write about anything Korean in my American way. Of course, there have been Korean American novels, many good ones. But I always felt that to address this thing that’s a huge part of my identity, I want the reader fully on board. Like if I’m going to talk about a Korean American character, I have to explain how he got to this country, where most Koreans couldn’t get in until after 1965? And what was his life during the Korean War? And wait, do we have to talk about living as a colonial subject under Japan? And how do we explain what Japan was doing there in the first place? And so on, until it almost feels like the last page of Portnoy’s Complaint—”Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”

  DG
  It’s not a conspiracy or a secret, but the Korean War is a sort of untold story in mainstream American culture. I remember watching the last episode of M*A*S*H (1972–83), which suddenly becomes part of your book.

  EP
  That series finale was this huge cultural event. But was anyone really thinking about the Korean War in 1983, thirty years after the cease-fire? The war was there but not there. I even read the novel that M*A*S*H was based on, which is bawdy but not exactly funny.

  DG
  And there was also the Robert Altman movie.

  EP
  Yeah—you have three versions of this conflict, and you don’t see the Korean viewpoint in any of them. My parents lived through the war, and I wanted to honor that somehow.

  DG
  The novel is like this reclamation project, where the characters are hunting for this secret history, but it’s only secret because people haven’t been informed about it.

  EP
  Speaking of 1983, another event seared into my memory was when the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was a passenger plane that had strayed off course. I have memories of my dad being outraged, of going to a small protest held in downtown Buffalo—he might have helped organize it. Someone burned a Soviet flag, but it was made out of paper and gone in a few seconds. That was forty years ago. It was so vivid to me, but I don’t think it’s left much of a dent on the public psyche. Like the Korean War, the forgotten aspect made it valuable to me as a novelist—I had to make it part of my fiction. It actually led me to discover a whole culture of Flight 007 truthers, as we’d call them now. I had no idea.

  DG
  Going back to what we were talking about with a systems book, there were times when I felt you were under the sign of Don DeLillo and other times when I felt like you were under the sign of Thomas Pynchon. There’s this satirical edge and a way of generating this corporate culture while channeling it through family life that reminds me of DeLillo, but the historical vision and the weaving of fact and fiction feel Pynchonian.

  EP
  Both those writers are incredibly important to me. The sheer scope of Underworld and how DeLillo managed these different narrative modes, all of that left a big mark. And I remember reading Mao II, which starts with a mass wedding of Unification Church members in Yankee Stadium, and thinking, Wow, that’s how you use history to tell a story. I remember DeLillo using the phrase pali, pali—“hurry up,” in Korean.

  DG
  DeLillo and Pynchon grapple with history and culture in a way that a lot of other great novelists just don’t bother with.

  EP
  The breadth of their vision is thrilling, but I’m equally inspired by their language and humor. When DeLillo wants to be funny, no one can touch him—Ratner’s Star is my secret favorite of his. Pynchon’s work is so assured and enigmatic, but I love that he can’t help but be playful. I think it’s safe to say the way I named characters was very influenced by Pynchon.

  DG
  And the punning, right? There’s one point where one of your characters wins a prize called the Peter Dong Award for Distinguished Pan-Asiatic Writing, and you write “Dong in hand ...” I laughed at that like twenty times. There’s the Amigone Funeral Home. And, of course, people keep wearing that T-shirt that says New York Review of Boobs.

  EP
  It’s quite juvenile, but I couldn’t stop. I should mention that Amigone is an actual Buffalo-area funeral home! One of those mysterious linguistic remnants from childhood.

  DG
  Part of what I love about those writers is they create such a broad canvas that there’s room to have a ridiculous, silly name, as well as a deep dive into real history and atrocity. In Same Bed, I loved the spy Sadako, the double, triple, maybe quadruple agent, but, as with Pynchon, I had no idea if that element was based on the truth.

  EP
  The Sadako character is based on a real figure. She came up in my reading about Itō Hirobumi, who was the former resident-general of Korea and who was assassinated in 1909, just before Korea was formally made a colony. I read that he’d adopted a Korean girl, which struck me as odd and irresistible from a fictioneering point of view. I couldn’t find a lot written about her in English, though my dad translated some websites for me. Anyway, my mind went to the place it went, where she’s his mistress.

  DG
  She’s a real person to the extent that you used the bones of her life.

  EP
  Yes. And I used the real birth and death dates, and that she was a nun and a spy, that she was adopted. But I imagined other elements, had her intersect with other real-life figures, most notably the poet Yi Sang. He was an important modernist writer, whose work is still powerfully strange. I just loved the idea of them both being part of the Korean Provisional Government.

  DG
  When Cormac McCarthy died, I felt like this generation of giants is heading toward the edge of the waterfall. Toni Morrison is gone. Philip Roth is gone. We haven’t heard from Pynchon in a long time, and I suddenly felt very moved by the idea of what he set out to do with his life: to absorb so much and somehow turn it into something of immense scale. One of the things that was so impressive about Same Bed Different Dreams— I don’t want to embarrass you—is that you’re interested in the monumental, the idea of writing a big book about big things.

  EP
  When I was pretty far into it, and realized what the themes were, I was like, I want to cover this stuff for artistic reasons and for personal reasons. Just thinking about my parents’ lives and what they lived through—it all seems so distant and so near. You know, my dad is always clear that there were people who had it much worse. His was more of a story of close calls.

  DG
  But even if you’re one of the lucky ones, like your dad, there’s still that sense of being tossed around on the waves of fate. Of powerlessness and chance.

  You also invented a bunch of great acronyms. LAFS for Love at First Sight. NAL, which is Nervous Asian Laughter. And there’s the Asian American Watchdog and Creative Writers Association, AAWCWA, pronounced “Awkward.” While you were writing, did you ever feel like you were suffering from GUMS?

  EP
  “Great Unfinishable Masterpiece Syndrome”— Echo has a bad case of it, according to Daisy, the translator.

  DG
  As your friend, I tried to subtly hint over the years that you should let me read your manuscript because I was worried you were writing yourself into a corner where you’d never be able to finish it. Happily, that turned out not to be true. And reading the novel, I realized you actually invented a term for that predicament.

  EP
  I love these great unfinished books that people still read, such as Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities or Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. But with GUMS, I was thinking, If I can name it, then I can avoid it.

  DG
  Same Bed Different Dreams heads into a metafictional terrain, which releases inhibitions so that almost anything can go in. The character Parker Jotter seems based partly on Philip K. Dick, who seems to be another presiding spirit guide of this novel.

  EP
  Parker Jotter’s original name in the book is Parker Edwards, which is just the inverse of my name. It’s a kind of pseudonym I’ve used myself.

  DG
  He’s like an alternate version of the writer you might have been.

  Was there any truth to the Friday the 13th stuff? That movie ends up playing a surprising role in the book.

  EP
  The only truth to it was that twenty years ago, I heard that Kim Jong Il’s favorite movie was Friday the 13th. I thought it was in a New Yorker article, but I can’t find it. Maybe it was in a book—I have boxes of books on North Korea. Kim was a huge cinephile, and in early volumes of his collected writings, most of the stuff is about moviemaking!

  Anyway, even back then, I thought the Friday the 13th rumor could be grist for the fiction mill. But like a lot of ideas, it went on the back burner. Then I found myself thinking about the movie and Kim Jong Il again, maybe because Same Bed already had the Korean poet Yi Sang in it, who wrote the famous, weird, and disturbing “Poem No. 1” in 1934 that uses the number 13. Anyway, early in the pandemic, I turned on the TV and Friday the 13th was on, so I finally got to see it. It was the middle of the day, and I was totally mesmerized. A few months later, reading a biography of Kim Il Sung [Kim Jong Il’s father] that I’ve poked through for twenty-five years, I found a “solution” as to why it might have been his favorite movie—totally fictional but very plausible.

  DG
  If this is a spoiler we can leave it out, but I wanted to talk about the end because it’s really moving. I started to feel like maybe the whole thing is Soon’s dream.

  EP
  I left it in a gray area. At a certain point I realized the book would end with Dream Five—it would end in Echo’s book, the interior book—but I didn’t know how. Sometime in year six or seven, as I was pouring a lot of work into the Dreams, the last line came to me, and it gave me chills. It became a mantra. I knew I had to work toward justifying that final line, even though I didn’t know what all the steps in between would be. The ending is a way for Soon to redeem his life and his story, but I think it’s also me saying goodbye to the novel and maybe also a whole way of writing about Korea. Not that I won’t write about it in the future, but with this book I used up most of the storehouse—everything about Korean history and Korean Americans that I’ve fantasized translating into fiction for years and years. I wanted to use them all in this book and see if I could make them connect and sing.

  DG
  Well, you did it. And as one of the people who was watching from the sidelines, it’s amazing. Congratulations.

  EP
  Thank you! You’re the best. Across all these years, talking with you has always been super inspiring.

  DG
  You are too kind! All right. Should we eat?

  EP
  Let’s eat!

Park, Ed SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS Random House (Fiction None) $30.00 11, 7 ISBN: 9780812998979

A secret history of Korea from the 20th century to the present, suffused with postmodern weirdness.

Park's beguiling, deliberately knotty second novel--following Personal Days (2008)--is built on three intersecting narratives. The first is told by Soon Sheen, author of an ill-selling short-story collection and now an employee of GLOAT, a Meta-like tech company. At a gathering of college friends and former publishing colleagues, he's introduced to Echo, author of what Soon is told is a brilliant novel titled Same Bed, Different Dreams. (Evoking David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Soon is told by the book's English translator that "some Koreans had gone mad after just a taste" of it.) The second narrative is the text of that novel, presented as a history of a secret Korean Provisional Government whose members include South Korean leader Syngman Rhee and a host of assassins, revolutionaries, and politicians. The third narrative concerns Parker Jotter, a Black Korean War veteran who's written a series of science fiction novels that, à la Philip K. Dick, question the nature of everyday reality. Park pushes each of these stories to the edge of coherence, willfully digressing and filling the tales with commentaries on the Buffalo Sabres, Kim Jong Il's obsession with the Friday the 13th movies, U.S. president William McKinley's assassination, and more. Yet there's no question that Park is in control of the story, and he reconciles it all brilliantly. It's an encyclopedic yarn about Korea's tragic and difficult 20th century, but also a compassionate study of how much we inherit culturally from the past, and how we're connected to it more deeply than we're inclined to think. And for all its Pynchonian gamesmanship, it's simply fun, rife with detours on parenthood, literature, hockey, and spycraft. Even in moments when it's not entirely clear where the story's going, Park is a savvy and entertaining guide.

A brash, rangy, sui generis feat of speculative fiction.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Park, Ed: SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762669113/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d52701df. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Same Bed Different Dreams

Ed Park. Random House, $30 (544p) ISBN 978-0-8129-9897-9

Park returns 15 years after Personal Days with an ingenious postmodern epic of colonial and postcolonial Korea framed in a satire of America's publishing and tech industries. Soon Sheen, a novelist turned tech employee, works at the Googleesque Gloat, where he unplugs from intrusive work notifications to read an English translation of Same Bed, Different Dreams, an "unfinished masterpiece" by obscure Korean author Echo. Much of Park's novel is comprised of Echo's narrative, which purports to be a "true account of the Korean Provisional Government," a nationalist group that formed in 1919 during the Japanese occupation and which Echo claims did not disband at the end of Japanese rule in 1945 but in fact continues to operate in secret. The KPG is a motley group; among the ideologically opposed "members" claimed by Echo are Parker Jortet, a Black Korean War veteran turned communist sympathizer and radical science fiction novelist, and Ronald Reagan, who decries the 1983 Soviet attack on a Korean passenger jet. Park exhibits a wizardly range of styles; he can be funny, such as when Soon's dog digs up a missing chapter of Echo's book just in time for Soon to read it; lyrical, as in a description of snow as Jotter prepares for a mission ("white pinpricks on my jacket like a universe being born"); or poignant, as with revelations about who was on the doomed flight. By the end, it all miraculously hangs together, driven by Park's deep passion for Korean history. This tribute to the fractured peninsula's citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages. (Nov.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Same Bed Different Dreams." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 36, 4 Sept. 2023, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A765992652/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1c0ac97d. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Same Bed Different Dreams. By Ed Park. Nov. 2023.544p. Random, $30 (9780812998979); e-book (9780812988314).

Riotous erudition runs rampant through Park's new novel, arriving 15 years after his celebrated debut, Personal Days (2008). Grander lauds are certainly forthcoming for his stupendous tome, a synergistic reclamation of East-West history, acrobatic sf, and biting sociopolitical commentary presented as three distinct prongs that brilliantly meld by the book's end. Narrative 1: Soon Sheen, an "I don't write anymore" writer-now-tech-drudge, has dinner in Manhattan's Koreatown, where he meets enigmatic Korean author Echo (formerly Cho Eujin), touted as "the next Rumi." On the train home to the 'burbs, he discovers in his satchel the manuscript of Same Bed, Different Dreams: Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government. Narrative 2: Those five dreams hold countless secrets about Korea (whole, colonized, divided, future), including the involvement of such highly unexpected figures as Jesus Christ, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan. Narrative 3: Black Korean War veteran, fighter pilot Parker Jotter, patiently pens five of an intended six books of his sf series, 2333, a space opera that's perhaps much closer to earthly revelations than it might seem at first read. For audiences wondering how much is "true," an open browser is recommended. But be warned. Park blurs fact and fiction so seamlessly that search results will undoubtedly surprise if not shock, albeit not without reverential delight.--Terry Hong

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hong, Terry. "Same Bed Different Dreams." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2023, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767773030/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=403fd997. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Ed Park

Same Bed Different Dreams

Random House, 2023

Every morning, Ed Park sits at his typewriter for twenty to thirty minutes to write. He throws on a vinyl record of some sort. Usually, it's classical music, like a Johannes Brahms piano trio or a Georg Philipp Telemann compilation. If it's going well, he repeatedly hits "play" until he runs out of steam.

His desk is small, tucked away in a corner of the Upper West Side apartment that he shares with his wife, Sandra, and their two sons. There are no windows. In the closet to his left, the washer and dryer stand guard.

Park's creative process is intentionally analog, purposefully hermetic. Outside of that curated authorial space, the world buzzes and distracts. So he avoids the temptation of Wi-Fi's swirling void of pixels. He avoids the risk of lyrics, their pesky tendency to entangle an author's literary thoughts as they travel to the page.

And though he could move his desk to another room, one with a view, he chooses not to. Like Soon Sheen, a character in Park's latest novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, he enters his own "Little Eden" and basks "in the unwiredness, free from all communication."

"I think sometimes when you're writing," he explained, "you just really want to be in an enclosed space with not that much outside you."

To an onlooker, such a creed of solitude comes to make perfect sense when she reads the literary mammoth that is Same Bed Different Dreams. It's impossible to understand how else Park could have managed to unsnarl and decode the obscurest fragments of history, memory, and emotion whirling around within him, much less within everyone else.

The "wild, sweeping novel"--as its publisher, Random House, anoints it-almost evades summary. Its timeline jumps from dates between 2016 CE and thousands of years in the past, its setting from Korea to Russia to Switzerland to the United States, and its cultural referents from Marilyn Monroe to Tim Horton and Kim Il Sung.

And at first glance, Same Bed Different Dreams' division into three alternating and recurring sections--"2333," "The Sins," and "Dreams"--appears mind-boggling. However, with patient attention and an appreciation of Park's crisp prose, a reader can see patterns emerge. The "2333" chapters follow Parker Jotter, a war veteran and science-fiction author. "The Sins" centers on Soon Sheen, an employee at an omniscient technology company. The "Dreams" present themselves as parts of a mysterious, unfinished manuscript. Park's throughline is the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), a pro-independence organization formed in 1919 in opposition to Japan's occupation of Korea that began in 1910. He imagines that it still exists, far beyond its supposed dissolution in 1945.

"The KPG lives on--working behind the scenes, laying the groundwork. As long as the country is split in two, its people divided, the Korean Provisional Government will be the sole sovereign body acting on behalf of all Koreans," Park writes. "Sometimes even the secret-secret members don't know they're members."

Through Same Bed Different Dreams, then, Park reinvents and re-contextualizes monumental swaths of Korea's traumatic past, one scarred by colonization and an ideological rift that broke the country into North and South. He fashions an alternate, restorative history not only for himself or other Korean Americans, but especially for his parents, who left Korea in 1966.

His father, S.K. Park, recalled being born into a country violated by its neighbor to the east, allowed to speak "only in Japanese at school during the occupation, even though Korean was [the] spoken language at home." He was nine when Japan surrendered to the US in the denouement of World War II, earning Korea its independence.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he and Park's mother, Yonzi Park, "experienced grave uncertainties just like many others," the elder Park noted. An estimated two to three million civilians died.

In 1960, S.K. and his peers at the Seoul National University College of Medicine took part in the April Revolution, a movement that aimed to end the tyranny of South Korea's first (and American-backed) president Syngman Rhee, who had tweaked the constitution to allow himself unlimited terms. Nearly two hundred people were killed and another six-thousand injured in the two weeks of protest.

Rhee figures as a prominent character in Same Bed Different Dreams. So do other political personalities like Kim Jong II, General Douglas MacArthur, and the controversial Unification Church leader, Sun Myung Moon--to name only a few of the sprawling, historical cast.

Park and his sister, Aileen Park, grew up with the stories of these people and the revolutions and unrest they ignited. Though S.K. denied credit for Park's "obsession on Korean themes," Park said that his father's recollections transformed Korea into a mythical space, "the source of everything."

"I wasn't born in Korea," Park said. So Same Bed Different Dreams "is maybe a portrait of what it meant to be a child of Korean immigrants.... You are fitting in as best you can, but there's something different. And there's a larger history that's looming behind you."

A smaller personal and literary history loomed behind Park at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn on November 7, 2023. He stood, in khakis and a blue button-down shirt, before an at-capacity crowd of some 140 people to celebrate the novel's official release.

"It's been a long time since 2008," he joked, in a self-effacing reference to the fifteen years that had passed since the publication of his first and only other novel, Personal Days. "It's great to have another book. I'm on the William Gaddis publication schedule, apparently."

He spoke with the same precise, comedic rhythm I'd come to recognize as his default cadence, which his closest friends and family had seen develop decades before.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s, Park had shown literary inclinations at an early age. "His devotion [to] reading was so obvious from the start that I knew he would be a scholar," S.K. told me. "At one point, he wrote to us that writing was his destiny and it was like his 'religion.'"

Park's droll wit was less apparent at home, though. It wasn't until a parent-teacher conference at Nichols School, where Park attended high school, that his parents became aware of his reputation as jokester.

"He was always just quietly hilarious," David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a classmate of Park's at Nichols, said.

Kirkpatrick and Park were part of a close-knit, studious group. They kept a low-profile socially, but that changed somewhat when Park began editing the humor page of the school's newspaper.

To other childhood friends like Jared Hardner, he "was the person that introduced me to different authors when we were growing up--different comedians, funny films." Park recalled, for example, that they all went to see Sam Shepard and Patti Smith's absurdist one-act, Cowboy Mouth.

"Something about it was so--it felt like it was breaking all these rules," Park mused. "I was so inspired by it that I wrote a play." He titled it Rough Beast and, with the help of a faculty member, got it produced at the Franklin Street Theatre in downtown Buffalo when he was seventeen years old. Kirkpatrick starred in it.

"In general," Kirkpatrick said, "anyone who knew Ed, knew he was going places."

About twenty years later, Personal Days revealed the satirist to the wider world and proved Kirkpatrick, among others, right.

Named one of Time magazine's top books of 2008, it follows an ensemble of characters who are co-workers at an unnamed, New York-based company. Things take on a strange, vaguely unsettling tilt when "the Firings" begin. "Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches. After several decades it wound up, to its surprise, as the easternmost arm of an Omaha-based octopus," Park writes in the first chapter of Personal Days, "Can't Undo." "Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us their easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely worded one-inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the Times that appeared last month."

Park found inspiration in the Village Voice's unraveling: he was serving as editor of the alternative newsweekly's literary supplement when New Times Media bought it in 2005. As greater and greater numbers of his colleagues were laid off, he hastily scribbled short paragraphs describing what he saw and heard. Brief, humorous notes evolved into a slim novel, a striking portrait of an anxious workplace culture.

Reviewers proclaimed Park a literary successor to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, and Joseph Heller. Colleagues saw themselves in its pages.

"I remember reading it and hoping that one character was me. And thinking another character was someone else. And seeing familiar jokes resurface," Rachel Aviv, a. New Former staff writer and mentee of Park's at the Village Voice, said.

Eventually, Park himself fell victim to the layoffs that plagued the paper. But that hardly put a stop--or even a slight pause--to his creative and professional output.

Let go from the Village Voice on Labor Day in 2006, Park gave himself until Thanksgiving of that year to finish Personal Days--and surprised himself by meeting that deadline. Meanwhile, he continued editorial duties at The Believer, a cultural journal that he'd co-founded in 2003 with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida. And looking through the "Parkhives," his self-named oeuvre, one discovers a vast, breathtaking amount of Park's fiction, criticism, and journalism, featured in publications like the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, and Bookforum.

Meanwhile, he played high-profile roles in the literary world as a senior editor at Amazon Publishing and an executive editor at Penguin Press. And he mentored the next generation of writers, like Aviv and Hua Hsu, a 2023 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. (Park continues to offer his counsel to Gen Z, too, as a professor of creative writing at Princeton.)

"He cultivated so many young writers and gave them opportunities," Aviv said, "that no one else would have given us. I feel like there are many people who feel like they wouldn't have had a career if it weren't for Ed."

All the while, the seeds of Same Bed Different Dreams sprouted, watered by the biographies he read, the people he met, and the childhood memories he unearthed. "I didn't start out thinking, I'm gonna write this gigantic book and it's gonna cover every single thing," Park said.

Rather, he started out for fun. "I was amusing myself writing that first long chapter, that dinner party with all the literary folk," Park said. "I didn't know what I was getting into."

Neither did Sandra Park, his wife and avowed "president of The Ed Park Fan Club." (Other members include the usual: their sons, his parents, and his sister. Plus, Sandra added, Park himself.) About six years ago--one or two years after he received the deal to write Same Bed Different Dreams--Sandra did a quick calculation about his pacing. Sandra told him "he had to leave his job" at Penguin Press "or else he was never going to finish his book." She promised to support the household as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

"At times, I thought that maybe he wouldn't finish--he did spend a lot of time doing the NY Times crossword puzzle," Sandra joked in an email.

When Sandra read the completed manuscript, she was surprised at how quickly he'd woven together its many complexities: "His writing is precise, clever, loaded with double meanings, obscure references, jokes, unconventional names, historical facts, personal memories, and much more."

Like Park, she told me that she saw Same Bed Different Dreams as a "book that really bridges a gap of what has been missing," a "point of connection with our experience and the histories that are known and told," for Asian Americans, specifically those who grew up in the US in the 1970s and'80s.

In this way, Park's work recalls the concept that scholar Marianne Hirsch developed in her seminal Family Frames (1997). She asked what relationship one, like Park, might have "to the traumatic events of one's parents' lives--horror? ambivalence? envy? a negative nostalgia?" She called this internal battle of emotions "postmemory."

A decade later, Korean-American poet and scholar Seo-Young Chu used this question as a base for molding the concept of "postmemory" to reflect Korean experiences. She tacked han onto Hirsch's term, a word with no equivalent in the English language. It's generally thought of as a unique form of Korean grief, and Chu argued that second-generation Korean Americans may experience "postmemory han" particularly strongly.

In our correspondence, Chu acknowledged that "some Koreans believe han is (or should be) obsolete--that the concept of han promotes ethnonationalism and/or that han prevents Koreans from moving past a victim mentality." But, she declared, "I reclaim han!"

Same Bed Different Dreams is Park's "postmemory han," his own reclamation, made tangible.

Take, for example, the "dinner party with all the literary folk." Soon Sheen, a character Park defined as a "stand-in" for himself, is invited out to celebrate a new (and purely fictional) author, dubbed the "enfant terrible of South Korean letters."

"Tonight would have been a rare treat," Park writes, "if not for all the Asian American literati who threatened to show up as well" and remind Soon Sheen that his last novel came out years earlier.

"I didn't write anymore," Sheen repeats four times. Here--like in the myriad references to Buffalo lore--Park the author is unabashedly present.

Through this presence, Park places himself--and his contemporary, second-generation Korean American peers--into the timeline, into the fray of what it means when, in dreams, one's parents speak to one in Korean, even if "They'd stuck to English while alive."

"The life does inform the book or the art," Park said. "There's a reason I wanted to write about Korea and think about it and somehow turn it into the kind of fiction that I like to read."

That internal sentiment was reiterated to Park when he traveled to Washington, DC in October 2023 to appear on a panel about storytelling for the Council of Korean Americans. He spoke about Same Bed Different Dreams, a "life's work," and the process of turning a lineage into a fiction.

Looking out into the crowd of first- and second-generation Korean faces, he felt like he was going to "start bawling." He apologized, asked the audience to give him a minute. He had thought he was sort of tough, he said, but a vague, overpowering sensation choked him.

"It was something about seeing all these people," he said. "And to kind of see, broadly, what Koreans have achieved here. But also, why are we here? ... What was lost and why was it lost? To what extent was it a failure of whoever was in charge of Korea, but also of the world? How was it that all these things happened that compelled people like my parents to leave?"

As Park recalled the moment, he paused: he was thinking of his paternal grandmother, whom he knew only through a single family photograph. She died of tuberculosis in Korea when Park's father, S.K., was young.

In another, simultaneous flash of remembrance, Park thought of Yi Sang, a favorite Korean poet of his whose entire life was marred by the Japanese occupation.

"Maybe that's why I'm so interested in Yi Sang," he said. "It's not just because he wrote this radical, brain-melting poetry. It's because he was in Korea at the same time, died of the same disease" as his grandmother. As ever for Park, literature, history, family, and memory dovetailed.

Alisyn Amant is a Wisconsin-born writer based in New York City. She studies arts and culture journalism at Columbia University.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Brooklyn Rail, Inc.
http://www.brooklynrail.org
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Amant, Alisyn. "Flash of Remembrance: The Multiplicity of Ed Park." The Brooklyn Rail, Mar. 2024, pp. 102+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786813803/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6c0598c1. Accessed 26 May 2024.

''Same Bed Different Dreams'' is the rare sophomore novel that has the wild, freewheeling ambition of a debut.

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, by Ed Park

Just after I'd registered for my first semester of college courses, I was meandering among a concourse of clubs and teams, fending off their grinning ambassadors, when a newspaper headline caught my eye: ''U.S. Says Soviet Downed Korean Airliner; 269 Lost.'' By today's standards the KAL 007 tragedy seems like a distant relic of Ronald Reagan's ''evil empire'' rhetoric, but at the time it was a Cold War grenade: Jet fighters scrambled, sabers rattled, tinfoil-hat theories spiked. Late in his lush, labyrinthine ''Same Bed Different Dreams,'' Ed Park recreates that moment, twisting the doomed flight's number into a James Bond motif that resonates throughout the novel. Double agents, sinister corporations, slasher films, U.F.O.s: If Park's suitcase is stuffed, well, it's an inspired choice for an odyssey that unpacks, in Pynchonesque fashion, Korean history and American paranoia.

Soon Sheen is an erstwhile Korean American writer turned lackey for GLOAT, a technology conglomerate. ''I wasn't clear on what the letters in GLOAT signified,'' he tells us. ''Possibly nothing. Or else many things: the phrase in question ever changing, apt for a company based on change. ('Good luck on all that,' we'd say to each other, at least once a week.)'' Soon's duties include inventing acronyms for marketing algorithms, from NCD (''Nicely Compensated Drudge'') to AWAM (''And what about me?'') to GUMS (''Great Unfinishable Masterpiece Syndrome''). Park revels in puns and ''wanton wordplay.''

In 2016 Soon joins a rowdy publishing dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, where, under the influence of alcohol, he accidentally swipes ''Same Bed, Different Dreams,'' a translated manuscript by the Korean literary ''enfant terrible'' Echo (a pen name). ''Same Bed, Different Dreams'' maps the arc of the mysterious Korean Provisional Government (or K.P.G.), an actual network founded in 1919 and then scattered abroad, fading out post-World War II. (Park's novel and Echo's nonfiction novel share a title, based on a Korean proverb and helpfully demarcated by Echo's comma, the punctuation a possible allusion to the 38th parallel.)

Back home in the suburb of Dogskill, a hung-over Soon realizes his mistake after his dog has ripped apart the manuscript, burying installments until digging them up for his master, bones from the past. Soon pores over the tattered pages, or ''dreams'': K.P.G. has somehow thrived amid darkened offices and abandoned apartments, striving for reunification of North and South.

Then there's Parker Jotter, a Black veteran shot down over MIG Alley during the Korean War and later rescued from a P.O.W. camp. Convinced he saw a massive spacecraft in midair, he discharges to Buffalo, where he sells electronics by day and scribbles by night: a series of science fiction novels known collectively as ''2333.'' Fans revere ''2333'' as a pulp classic, although Jotter never finished his sixth (and final) volume before his death in 1993. Park rounds out his cast with Soon's wife, Nora You, a nail salon mogul; their adopted white daughter, Story; Monk Zingapan, a gamer-cum-writing-coach; and sundry alums of Vermont's Penumbra College.

Penumbra, Story, Echo, Dogskill: Park's allegory moves along multiple tracks. ''Same Bed Different Dreams'' demands that we surrender to its energy and go with the flow when we don't quite know where we're going. It's a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands? Park seeks to encompass the vast Korean diaspora, but he's also fleeing realism, a personal diaspora, away from conventional forms. His totems propel us forward: an underground cell whose members have nine fingers; the dawn of A.I.; hockey lore; a Zippo lighter; the lines and circles of Korean script. (There's even a minor character named Totem, Park's wink to his technique.) The satire comes at us fast and thick, but is this Rube Goldberg contraption too clever by half?

Not for this reader. ''Same Bed Different Dreams'' struts confidently across registers -- lyrical, deadpan, acerbic, comedic -- while doling out clues. Characters rotate in and out, some glimpsed in passing, their motives opaque. Real-life figures linger on the margins; Park writes of the anarchist Emma Goldman: ''With her pince-nez she resembles a small, clean old man, barely clearing the podium, but she is the most appealing woman he's ever seen. Light glints off the lenses, mesmerizing as she talks, her voice like an auctioneer's.'' He splices in brilliant set pieces: the assassination of William McKinley; the origin of the ''Friday the 13th'' franchise; the tormented career of South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee; and the Forgotten War itself, rife with bloody corpses and political miscalculation. The book's many elements fall into place.

Park homes in on Inky Sin, Jotter's Buffalo psychiatrist, who boards KAL 007 en route to a medical conference in Seoul, accompanied by his wife. (The trip's a front for more K.P.G. skulduggery.) The Sins leave behind a troubled teenage son, stranded in a Nebraska reform school; he may hold the key that unlocks ''Same Bed, Different Dreams.'' Like Lewis Carroll or David Lynch, Park mulls obsessively over dreams, those flimsy portals onto other lives and logics. Myths and identities jumble and morph into something new; the cool factor hits with the force of ''The Crying of Lot 49'' or Justin Torres's recent ''Blackouts.''

True to the spirit of ''2333,'' 2023 has been a banner year for experimental literature that delves audaciously into the senseless agonies of our own age. As Echo's manuscript observes of the science fiction titan Philip K. Dick: ''In his hands, the real world turns out to be a simulacrum, or a hallucination, or a shimmering entertainment meant for someone else. In story after story he lays out the true, secret nature of American society -- drab on the outside, garbled and haunted within.'' The same can be said of Park's sprawling, stunning novel.

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of ''This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.''

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS | By Ed Park | Random House | 544 pp. | $30

Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of ''This Boy's Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.''

CAPTION(S):

This article appeared in print on page BR11.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Cain, Hamilton. "Parallel Reality." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Dec. 2023, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776482879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2cf07e05. Accessed 26 May 2024.

It's been 15 years since the release of Ed Park's 2008 debut, Personal Days. Though the book has become a classic in the office novel subgenre, it's still remembered in conjunction with another workplace satire: Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, which published a year earlier and, unlike Park's novel, went on to become a bestseller.

"Who knew that that book would be so big?" Park says of Ferris's novel, laughing. He's speaking via Zoom from a hotel room in Banff, Canada, taking a moment away from his vacation with his wife and two teenage children. Park hasn't read Ferris's book, but he remembers his own debut fondly, saying he was happy with the publication and the attention it received. Aftet it came out, though, he was ready to do something different--something that grappled with his cultural identity.

His follow-up, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, Nov.), is a massive undertaking--PWs review described it as an "ingenious epic of Korean and Korean American history framed in a satire of the publishing and tech industries." The scale of ambition, layers of complexity, and artful precision are more than enough to explain the lengthy gap between it and Personal Days. There were other reasons, though. He taught at Columbia University and NYU, then worked as a book editor, first at Little A and then Penguin Press, until 2017. He also became a dad.

"It's been 15 years since my first kid was born, and I don't think it's a coincidence that Personal Days came out 15 years ago," Park says. "I was always trying to write, you know, putting in the time." Luckily, his other work all fed into the project. "All of these things are good for each other," he adds, noting that themes of parenthood and ancestry were driving forces as he pieced together the novel.

Same Bed Different Dreams is about an "unfinished masterpiece" by an obscure Korean author named Echo, a sprawling hybrid narrative that purports to be a secret history of the Korean Provisional Government, which was in exile during Japan's occupation of the peninsula up until the end of World War II. Park's protagonist, Soon Sheen, is a novelist turned tech worker whose parents, like Park's, emigrated from South Korea in the 1960s to Buffalo, N.Y. After Soon meets Echo at a party hosted by an old publishing friend, he gets his hands on the manuscript.

Fans of Personal Days who have been waiting for this follow-up will find Park's portrayal of the lapsed writer affecting. Soon is less than satisfied working for a Google-like company called Gloat and, once he dives into Echo's book, he regularly unplugs from his job to read it.

The captivating quality of Echo's obscure manuscript feels like a nod to the hidden gems Park is known for championing as a critic. Though he's a big fan of postmodern titans like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, he has a reputation for bringing light to forgotten work by writers such as Russell Hoban and Charles Portis, the latter of whom he identified as being "like Cormac McCarthy, but funny" in a 2003 piece for the Believer. (Park is a cofounder of the magazine.)

When asked what draws him to underappreciated books, Park says, "I wonder if it's partly because there was something about the mainstream novel that I felt excluded from." Reflecting on coming of age in the 1980s as a bookworm and his time in the Columbia MFA program in the 1990s, he recalls, "I wasn't seeing a lot of people who look like me or had kind of my background. And it's almost like, sure, I'll read a book by a Hungarian refugee that was written in French or, you know, a weird goose chase by Charles Portis. I think, partly, there was this unconscious wish to elevate these books because I wanted what is spoken of as literature to be a little broader, and then maybe I would be included in that embrace as well." By this point, he's broken into a laugh, and he concludes in pure self-effacing fashion: "That's maybe too deep, but it's occurred to me."

Asian American identity wasn't a major theme in Personal Days, though the book touches on race with a recurring episode in which an HR person confuses two people of color in the predominantly white office--something that happened to him and a colleague at the Village Voice, where he worked until 2006 as editor of the literary supplement.

He first got the idea to delve into Korean history while he was at Columbia. Having grown up in a small family in Buffalo, far from large Korean American populations, he knew there was so much he didn't know. He enrolled in a seminar on modern Korean history, raught by the late Gari Ledyard, an American scholar of Korea, whom he credits with giving him an understanding of how Japanese colonization and the Korean War shaped his parents, and for telling him there was "grist for a novel" in his passion and curiosity.

When Park finally got started on Same Bed Different Dreams, one of the conceits was that a Korean author could never break into the U.S. market. It was an assumption Park himself held while working in publishing, until 2016, when a translation of Han Kang's The Vegetarian became a runaway bestseller here.

"When you sit with your own creative project for such a long time," he says, "certain things come to pass and you have to check your assumptions."

As the novel took shape, one of the major challenges was finding a way to justify having a book within the book. Park knew he wanted to apply what he loves in revisionist historicals like Pynchon's Mason & Dixon to Korea and landed on an organizing principle after looking back at Underworld by DeLillo, a novel that threaded together huge swaths of 20th-century American history with the story of a baseball that kept changing hands.

One of Park's postmodern flourishes involves a character named Parker Jotter, a Black veteran of the Korean War with a delightfully Pynchonesque name who returns to Buffalo after surviving a POW camp and writes a series of radical science fiction novels in the vein of Philip K. Dick called 2333. Some readers may recognize the series title as a reference to Roberto Bolano's 2666, but the number has its own hidden meanings in Park's novel. Without going into spoilers, it relates to the Korean Provisional Government, which, according to Echo's book within the book, did not disband after Japan's 1945 withdrawal from Korea (like the real KPG did), but in fact continues to operate as a secret international organization aimed at reunifying the country. It's safe to reveal, though, that Jotter is a member of the KPG.

Park put a lot of himself into the book, too, drawing not just on his experience in publishing and his Korean American identity but also on his hometown of Buffalo. In addition to the Jotter story, there's an episode referencing a bit of sports history--specifically a 1976 publicity stunt by the city's NHL team, the Sabres, involving a fictitious Japanese draft pick. (Park's father hasn't missed a Bills or Sabres game in decades, and Park grew up a dedicated Buffalo sports fan. Like the KPG, sports fandom is inclusive.)

With Same Bed Different Dreams, Park has not only written the Undenvorld of Korean history but has created a novel that won't be upstaged by someone else's book. In the time spent since his debut as an editor and critic, and having built on decades of inspiration, he's more than deserved his embrace.

BY DAVID VARNO

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Varno, David. "A SECRET HISTORY: Over a decade in the making, Ed Park's new novel is an inspired and deeply personal masterwork." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 37, 11 Sept. 2023, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766560023/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2a870c24. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Park, Ed BUFFALO NOIR Akashic (Adult Fiction) $15.95 11, 3 ISBN: 978-1-61775-381-7

Twelve new short stories show the darker side of the City of Light. In "Dr. Kirkbride's Moral Treatment Plan," Christina Milletti follows a patient in a crumbling old psychiatric hospital who insists her husband went into his study to write a book and never came out. Tom Fontana's "It's Only for Forever" describes a barroom bargain written and signed on a paper napkin. A rich man trying to beat a murder rap underestimates Lawrence Block's dapper lawyer in "The Ehrengraf Settlement." Dimitri Anastasopoulos presents a suspended crime-scene investigator and his layabout housemate living near the perpetually drifting bubbles of "The Bubble Man of Allentown." A former vet who can't live up to his father's reputation finds rough redemption in Lissa Marie Redmond's "Falling on Ice," and a stuffed teddy bear is an unwitting decoy in S.J. Rozan's "Parkside." The hero of John Wray and Brooke Costello's "Chicken Noodle's Night Out" joins the entourage of a hometown music legend. In "Peace Bridge," Connie Porter's failed artist doesn't foresee the consequences of buying a gun for protection. When Joyce Carol Oates' lonely 15-year-old girl gives her algebra teacher a homemade valentine, it leads to a surreal journey amid a nighttime snowstorm in "Valentine." A mother anxious for morning reassures her son with stories about a Buffalo landmark in editor Park's "The Odd." Lust for a vintage car motivates Gary Earl Ross' "Good Neighbors," and a chance discovery takes an unexpected turn in Kim Chinquee's "Hand." From the Irish enclave of South Buffalo and a Niagara Street bar to a costly house in Nottingham Terrace and a once-grand Gothic structure in Elmwood Village, Buffalo's past and present come to life in the offbeat, disturbing, and sometimes darkly comical tales by authors who really know their city.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Park, Ed: BUFFALO NOIR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A428372802/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6af2e8a2. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Park, Ed READ HARDER Believer Books/McSweeney's (Adult Nonfiction) $18.00 9, 9 ISBN: 978-1-940450-18-6

Nineteen essays, often funny and sometimes poignant, from the journalists, essayists and novelists long admired by the editors at McSweeney"sBelievermagazine.Upon its launch, the founders of the magazine said, "We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt." Soon after, a critic described the magazine as "highbrow but delightfully bizarre," which fits the bill. This new collection of essays by the likes of Nick Hornby, Susan Straight, Lev Grossman and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah certainly strikes that unique and iconoclastic tone--McSweeney"s founder Dave Eggers" tastes and style are all over this collection, if not his name. Edited by founding editors Park (Personal Days, 2008) and Julavits (The Vanishers, 2012, etc.), the collection spans a wide range of literary criticism, celebrity profiles, journalistic nonfiction and humorous ephemera. It opens with "The Disappearance of Ford Beckman," by Michael Paul Mason, a story that wouldn"t go amiss inEsquire, concerning an iconic American artist reduced to making donuts at Krispy Kreme. Closer to the end, novelist Leslie Jamison examines a bizarre, Tennessee-based endurance test called the Barkley Marathons. On the literary front, mystery novelists Sara Gran and Megan Abbott tackle the enduring legacy of V.C. Andrews, while journalist Zach Baron delves into the late Robert Jordan and the finishing of the Wheel of Time saga. It can be a jarring transition, following Jeannie Vanasco"s examination of erasure (the art form, not the band) in "Absent Things As If They Were Present," with Rebecca Taylor"s "Virginia Mountain Scream Queen," remembering a lowbrow history in B-movies, but it"s refreshing, too. It"s really best to jump around--only readers can best decide if they should start with "How to Scrutinize a Beaver" (on 18th-century anatomy) or "If He Hollers Let Him Go" (chasing the ghost of comedian Dave Chappelle).Hotly anticipated in 2020:The Believer"sRead Hard with a Vengeance.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Park, Ed: READ HARDER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2014. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A370998118/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7cf0e38. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Read Harder. McSweeney's. Sept. 2014. 336p. ed. by Ed Park & Heidi Julavits. ISBN 9781940450186. pap. $18. COMM

Author Dave Eggers's McSweeny's publishing is home to a trend-setting website, a variety of book imprints, and unconventional magazines including the Believer, a monthly publication Eggers launched in 2003 that features interviews, book reviews, and essays with observations on pop culture and literature. Two of the Believer's founding editors, Park (Personal Days) and Julavits (The Vanishers), have compiled these essays into a volume highlighting the magazine's quirky style and eclectic mix of topics. Some of the subjects covered include Victorian travel guides, fantasy writer Robert Jordan, comedian Dave Chappelle, and a record player that was made in the 1950s for car dashboards. Best-selling authors Nick Hornby (About a Boy) and Lev Grossman (The Magician) are among the writers featured in the collection. A slight improvement could have been made to this otherwise engaging read by including the original publication date of each piece, especially those with contemporary themes. VERDICT For fans of Eggers and McSweeny's publications, pop culture enthusiasts, and readers of literary magazines.--Donna Marie Smith, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

Smith, Donna Marie

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Smith, Donna Marie. "Read Harder." Library Journal, vol. 139, no. 13, 1 Aug. 2014, p. 104. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A377408389/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dbd69e6. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Read Harder. Ed. by Ed Park and Heidi Julavits. Sept. 2014.300p. McSweeney's, paper, $18 (9781940450186). 808.84.

The smack and smarts of this collection, with its varied voices and manners of attack, will set readers' minds aflame. Each piece here, from Francisco Goldman's reflection on the novel-memoir-prose work he wrote about his wife's death to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's search for the truth about comedian Dave Chappelle's decision to walk away from his $5 million job, so sparks the intellect that the book must be set aside and pondered before continuing. And there's so much more to come back to: Monte Reel on "How to Explore like a Real Victorian Adventurer" and Susan Straight, in "Travels with My Ex," on being a white woman driving with her black ex-husband and their multiracial children in Southern California. There are 19 essays of varying lengths and subjects and from writers ranging from Rebecca Taylor and Colin Asher to Nick Hornby. Editors Park and Julavits have picked these selections from the decade-long-running magazine Believer, and a well-chosen, wide-ranging lot they are.--Eloise Kinney

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Kinney, Eloise. "Read Harder." Booklist, vol. 111, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A385404212/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=57350d83. Accessed 26 May 2024.

"Park, Ed: SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A762669113/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d52701df. Accessed 26 May 2024. "Same Bed Different Dreams." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 36, 4 Sept. 2023, p. 57. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A765992652/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1c0ac97d. Accessed 26 May 2024. Hong, Terry. "Same Bed Different Dreams." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2023, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767773030/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=403fd997. Accessed 26 May 2024. Amant, Alisyn. "Flash of Remembrance: The Multiplicity of Ed Park." The Brooklyn Rail, Mar. 2024, pp. 102+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786813803/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6c0598c1. Accessed 26 May 2024. Cain, Hamilton. "Parallel Reality." The New York Times Book Review, 17 Dec. 2023, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776482879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2cf07e05. Accessed 26 May 2024. Varno, David. "A SECRET HISTORY: Over a decade in the making, Ed Park's new novel is an inspired and deeply personal masterwork." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 37, 11 Sept. 2023, pp. 22+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766560023/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2a870c24. Accessed 26 May 2024. "Park, Ed: BUFFALO NOIR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2015. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A428372802/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6af2e8a2. Accessed 26 May 2024. "Park, Ed: READ HARDER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2014. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A370998118/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e7cf0e38. Accessed 26 May 2024. Smith, Donna Marie. "Read Harder." Library Journal, vol. 139, no. 13, 1 Aug. 2014, p. 104. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A377408389/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3dbd69e6. Accessed 26 May 2024. Kinney, Eloise. "Read Harder." Booklist, vol. 111, no. 2, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A385404212/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=57350d83. Accessed 26 May 2024.

Word Count