A Collection of Curiosities: A Review of Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis

Reflecting decades of an extraordinary writing career, Ed Park’s new short story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, offers a reading experience akin to entering the enchanted curio cabinet of his mind. To examine its contents is an exercise that proves fascinating, slightly puzzling, and always rewarding. If there are mismatched candlesticks found inside said cabinet, one could set them on a table to achieve unconventional flair.

Ed Park resists easy categorization. Now in his fifties, he has managed the persona of oddball literary everyman: magazine co-founder, senior editor, award-winning writer, Ivy League professor, and Pulitzer Prize finalist (2024) for the stunning novel Same Bed Different Dreams. A Korean American from Buffalo—yet thoroughly a New Yorker—Park weaves bits of these settings and identities into his stories, alongside authorial obsessions and preoccupations to offer an amalgamation of high-low cultural concerns unspooled in prose both moving and a whole lot of fun. The sixteen stories in An Oral History of Atlantis take various forms, many of which bypass narrative traditions and push the boundaries of what, exactly, constitutes a short story.

The book opens with “A Note to My Translator,” a letter in which a frustrated author reprimands his French-to-English translator who has taken considerable liberties with the assignment. Loaded with hilarious details, the characters essentially one-up each other in a battle over who is the most insufferable. Is it the self-serious author, Hans de Krap, or is it E., the freewheeling translator?  “The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball,” the offended author writes, prompting us to imagine what could possibly elicit such feedback. This story’s position at the collection’s forefront feels almost confrontational to the reader, who is perhaps ready to settle into a new book, with its distinctly unsettling suggestion that the meaning of a word, a work—anything—is never truly fixed. Perhaps narrators cannot be trusted. Perhaps reality is up for negotiation. Perhaps readers would do well to keep an eagle eye out for Mr. de Krap, who may be involved in another metafictional twist further into the collection.

One of my favorite stories is “Weird Menace,” a transcription of a DVD commentary track for a campy sci-fi film shot decades earlier. Composed entirely of dialogue between a washed-up director named Toner Low and a former B movie actress, Barbara Lee Hanbok (once Baby Moran), the story captures the simultaneous sadness and excitement of two people revisiting a faded moment of glory—so faded, in fact, memories falter. Their journey through the past prompts a tour through Toner’s tumultuous love life, but the quippy banter between the old colleagues keeps things buoyant:

 “God this music is terrible. What? Was there a fire sale on theremins?”

 “Another drink?”

“You are an angel in human form, Baby.”

“Our viewers will probably be interested to know we’ve been drinking this whole time. Did I already say this? Possibly.”

“Little itty-bitty drinklets.”

At one point in the recoding, Barbara plugs her latest venture, a steakhouse located “right on the border of West Eucalyptus and East Eucalyptus.” These place names recur throughout the collection, forming waypoints for many characters to crisscross as if living in a shared reality—one set slightly apart from the world as we know it. The city of Eucalyptus—East, West, and plain Eucalyptus—appears in other stories but is fictional. I think. One is never quite sure of what is real, a technique Park used to mind-bending effect in Same Bed Different Dreams, which concerns Korea’s fraught modern history. Interestingly, Same Bed’s fictional Penumbra College, set in the real state of Vermont, makes three cameos in Atlantis. The deeper I moved into the collection, the more I felt as if I were making my way through the Ed Park literary universe. Even more so when I learned penumbra—originally an astronomical term—refers to a shadowy or marginal area.

The nature of obsession itself is up for discussion in many of Park’s stories. “The Gift,” for instance, follows a community college professor, Dublinski, and a few hopelessly devoted acolytes of his “unshaven cosmopolitan allure and his elfin features and his endlessly repatched corduroy blazer.” Park builds and builds Dublinski’s elusive, exotic mystique, as seen through the eyes of his students, “the children of mill workers and collision specialists,” who are foaming at the mouth for a little glamour. “His origins were shrouded in rumor,” they observe, “perfumed with adventure and abstruse interlinear controversy.” Park unleashes a sequence of linguistic acrobatics until reaching a conclusion so unworthy as to be worthy of Dublinski’s hype; it sticks the landing by tumbling over.

A mysterious writer also figures in the titular story, “An Oral History of Atlantis,” where science fiction meets Moby Dick in a tale of a dystopian Manhattan. Park creates an atmosphere of mystery and promise by collapsing fact and fiction, the nineteenth century, the present day, and the speculative future. Here, the self-proclaimed “dwarven” protagonist is in hot pursuit of Walter Walter, an “exiled” detective novelist, after spotting him in a diner. He follows Walter to Water Street, a location that, this time, I know is real. For years I lived one block from Water Street in a building, which, coincidentally, features an engraved inscription about Herman Melville in its stone courtyard. Park’s protagonist follows Walter into an old-timey peep show and enters a booth where he peers through some kind of pre-cinematic kinetoscope and is moved to tears by the image of a solitary whale. Outlandish prose hurdles the story along before ending on a note of wistful contemplation befitting the collection. It is a bit sad and lonely, but, again, the playful tone mitigates the melancholic mood, creating a fine balance.

For all his wit, Park has plenty of soul. His structural hijinks—which could verge on gimmickry in lesser hands—serve the emotional core churning beneath these stories that probe questions about what it means to be human. Park reels us in with the wild details, the strange names, and the cool sense of humor, but then proceeds to poke us in the gut as his characters navigate loneliness, vanity, insecurity, and general bewilderment with life in a world of exponential technology. In fact, the first words of “Slide to Unlock,” a story told purely through password recall and in the second-person voice, encapsulate Park’s approach perfectly: “You cycle through your passwords. They tell the secret story. What’s most important to you, the things you think can’t be deciphered. Words and numbers stored in the lining of your heart.” This perspective resonates with me, someone who feels as alienated by machines as I am enthralled, and I cannot help but sense a kernel of universal sentiment here—I think Ed Park might, too. An Oral History of Atlantis is marvelously entertaining; I will be thinking about these stories for a long time to come.

 

---

A Conversation with Ed Park

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) and Personal Days (2008), and the collection An Oral History of Atlantis (July 2025), all published by Random House. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Hemingway Award, and other honors, and has won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Asian Pacific American Award for Literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and many other places. He is a founding editor of The Believer and was executive editor at Penguin Press. He teaches creative writing at Princeton and lives in Manhattan. ed-park.com.

Fiction Editor Megan Peck Shub and Ed Park conversed with one another via email to discuss the craft and inspiration behind the stories included in An Oral History of Atlantis.

 

INTERVIEWER

The stories in An Oral History of Atlantis were written over a span of 25 years, which makes it somewhat difficult to ask what was on your mind when you wrote them. Nevertheless, what recurring questions have you been considering for half your life that animate this collection?

ED PARK

Over the years, I seem to come back to certain themes—technology, memory, art, relationships—less by design than by instinct. I wrote the first story here, “A Note to My Translator,” as a letter from an imperious old foreign author who enumerates the errors the translator has made in Englishing his book.

There’s fun to be had in the slippage, and I return to that kind of comedy of errors again and again. The inadequacy of language. Things breaking down. For instance, the malfunctioning cameras used during a Skype call in “Two Laptops” distort the speakers’ faces. In “Weird Menace,” the director and star of a 1980s science-fiction movie meet up years later to record commentary for the Blu-ray Disc release and find themselves misremembering actors, plot points, and even moments from their own lives.

INTERVIEWER

I am curious about the editing process and how it felt to revisit work you wrote long ago—on both the emotional and technical levels. Can you describe that experience for us?

ED PARK

It was fun and unexpectedly moving to revisit some of the older pieces. Twenty-five years is a long time, and though I’m the same writer in many ways as I was in my twenties and thirties and forties, it was interesting to see how the stories serve as time capsules, capturing the mood and machines of the era. This is probably most evident in the ones in which technology thrums in the background, from Facebook and Twitter to the first-edition Kindle and the aforementioned Skype. Apps and companies fall by the wayside, and though these brand names date the stories, it didn’t feel necessary to update them—indeed, to do so would wreck something essential. Better to have these markers in there.

I was frankly stunned by the language of the earliest selections here—especially the title story and the one with the longest name (“Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts”). That’s me just past 30, still with a desire to stretch sentences past the breaking point, adorn them, make them transcend the marks on the page. I don’t really write like that anymore, and I was struck by the sheer ambition of creating new worlds by refreshing the tongue.

On the more technical side, I wanted these stories to connect—sometimes overtly, other times in a subterranean fashion. Obviously one can pick up the book, dive into a story at random, and find pleasure, but having them all in one book suggested to me that they were partaking in some larger story. I noticed I’d used the name Hannah Hahn in a few stories, including “Seven Women” and “Weird Menace.” Could she be the same person? Should she be the same person?

I actually drew a chart for all the characters—their names up top, and a timeline down the side—just to see if I could justify, chronologically, having people pop up in cameos in other people’s stories. This was a lot of fun but required quite a bit of mapping. Mostly I was able to slot the folks in question into various roles, but in some cases, I had to hold back. For example, there was originally a Bethany Koo in “Seven Women” and a Bethany Blanket in “Machine City,” and I dearly wanted them to be the same person, but it just didn’t make sense.

I was also able to link the last story to the first, to create an ouroboros effect. Some people don’t go wild over that sort of circular structure, so I keep it on the down-low. But it’s there for those who like that sort of thing!

INTERVIEWER

Your writing is often hilarious, especially the first-person narrators, like author Hans de Krap in the epistolary story “A Note to My Translator,” or the seven former community college students in “The Gift,” also a story in letter form, who collectively recall their experience with Dublinski, an absurd instructor of a seminar on aphorisms whose ridiculous practices escalate throughout the course. I am ambivalent about the merits of discussing technique regarding comedy—to dissect it feels a bit like extinguishing the ineffable magic of humor—but then again, discussing these things is indeed what we do here. Do you consider yourself funny? If I’m not too much of a buzzkill to ask, can you articulate your approach to humor?

ED PARK

Humor on the page is tricky. Sometimes a good joke or super-daft play on words that might pop into my head during a walk will translate perfectly into whatever story I’m working on—or indeed even inspire a brand-new story. Other times it requires a lot of whittling and hair pulling, and the whole thing might need to get thrown out anyway.

But often, if I get a story rolling, and the mood and landscape that I’ve opened up are amenable, I’ll be able to generate the jokes, the banter, the silly names, and so forth as I’m writing. The better it goes, the easier it gets.

Humor is generally easier to write when it comes to short stories—brevity being the soul of wit. For novels, the bar is higher, I think, because publication is relatively so far off that you have to consider, with each revision, with every passing month or year: Is this still funny? Will people find this funny two years from now? With short story writing, blissfully, this doesn’t happen as much. You just want to get it out the door.

With few exceptions, I struggle to read authors without a sense of humor on the page. (I recently read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time and thought, “Why didn’t anyone tell me this was funny?”) Growing up, I was thrilled to discover Vonnegut, Brautigan, Douglas Adams, and the newspaper columns of Dave Barry. Come to think of it, my first publication was a humor piece for a local magazine—a “how to” guide of some sort. Nothing beats a piece of good comic fiction for escapism. Laughter is a healthy, body-brightening phenomenon.

And I’ll add that, though these stories mostly start in a comic mode, inevitably a touch of sadness creeps in. A lot of life feels that way. By the same token, even the bleakest scenarios have some sliver of absurdity. At least I hope so.

INTERVIEWER

As a writer of prose, how would you describe your relationship to poetry?

ED PARK

I used to work for the Poetry Foundation. At certain points in my life, I’ve written poems. And I’ve written extremely short stories that feel more like poems, none of which are included in An Oral History of Atlantis. My next book, Three Tenses, is a sort of experimental memoir I wrote in the late ’90s that consists of hundreds of fragments, most of them just a sentence or two long. As I said, my earlier prose in general was more florid, more lyrical, so this fits right in. But I still like it when one of my sentences turns in a surprising performance—a cluster of unusual adjectives, a sharp rhythm that just feels right.

INTERVIEWER

I recall hearing an interview with Andre Dubus III where he stated that for writers, reading poetry is like eating your vegetables. Even if he did not say exactly this, and was instead referring to some other fortifying act, it seems like a valid principle. I am curious if you have any practices that sustain your creative output. On the opposite end, do you have any writing habits you absolutely loathe? I expect that many readers of this exchange are themselves writers and, well, misery loves company.

ED PARK

I try to write every day. The best thing to do is to detach yourself from the internet. Often I’m using a typewriter; I’ll put on a record—generally classical music—and type until the side is over. Then, hopefully, I’ll feel like I’m on enough of a roll to play the record again, type again. If things are really going well, I might flip it over to Side B.

I write a lot of notes, particularly in the midst of novel writing but often for stories, too. Names, things I want to happen, things I shouldn’t forget. I do this rather obsessively. I also write down the titles of books and stories I’ve written, of books and stories I want to write, even if I don’t know the substance of what those future books and stories might be. It can feel a little like a magic ritual.

I don’t have a lot of rules. Something I’ve always kept in mind, ever since my mid-twenties when I was writing long novels that would never get published: No one will write the book for you. There’s only you.

On a piece of cardboard I once wrote down a line from Cheever: “A page of good prose remains invincible.”

INTERVIEWER

I detect some pulpy, science fiction-y currents coursing through your work in a way that feels reverent to the genre. “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” for example, includes a character who writes reviews for the California Science Fiction Review, which, as far as I know, is itself a fictional publication. “Weird Menace,” as you’ve mentioned, takes the form of an audio commentary recorded for the release of a collector’s edition DVD of a cult sci-fi hit. Please tell us what you geek out on and how it shapes your writing.

ED PARK

At the time of writing “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” one of my freelance gigs was as the science-fiction columnist for the Los Angeles Times where I wrote a monthly piece under the heading “Astral Weeks.” In the character of Tabby, I imagined someone who could make a living from that type of work.

I read a good deal of science fiction in my early teens, which left a huge impression. I subscribed to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, read Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Octavia E. Butler, the aforementioned Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, LeGuin, Frank Herbert, John Varley, Clifford D. Simak. Stephen King’s The Stand (not to mention virtually everything else he published). Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions anthology warped my mind. Lovecraft, too. I also played some s-f RPGs—Star Frontiers and Gamma World—and watched whatever movies I could find, good or bad. These days I’m reading more horror—John Langan, Paul Tremblay, and older stuff. The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, from 1894, was a book I recently found completely terrifying.

INTERVIEWER

As a foreigner living in Korea, I spend a lot of time discussing identity and culture with first-gen Korean Americans who have returned to the motherland for various reasons. (My interest in this topic comes from my background producing a PBS series about genealogy.) Korea figures more explicitly in your novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, than in this collection where it makes a cameo in a few stories, including “Seven Women.” Could you tell us a bit about your family’s journey and your own relationship to Korea?

ED PARK

I was born in Buffalo, New York, to parents who had immigrated from Korea. There was a small, tight-knit Korean community in Buffalo, and I had many Korean friends—but we were more connected to American pop culture (and Buffalo sports) than we were to whatever was happening in Korea. I was fairly removed from Korea, but also curious, and in the fall of 1992, fresh out of college, I lived in Seoul for about nine months. Some of those impressions found their way into “Seven Women” and especially into “Watch Your Step.” These two stories are narrated by my stand-in, Miriam (perhaps “Mimi” being a variation of “Me, me!”), who represents someone both alienated from and energized by an unfamiliar environment.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the best advice about writing you ever received? Can you gift it to us?

ED PARK

Yes. I heard Jonathan Franzen say something to the effect of: If you’re having fun writing it, it’s probably good. If you’re not—it’s probably not!