AN ORAL HISTORY of ATLANTIS: Stories by Ed Park - Spotlight

 

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS (RandomHouse) is a deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life. 

In “Machine City,” a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,” a man comes to terms with his life via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,” a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ’80s that neither seems to remember all that well.

In author, Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis (RandomHouse), characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning and transitory nature of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

Ed Park is the author of the novels SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the novel PERSONAL DAYS, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

He is a founding editor of The Believer, and his writing appears in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, and other publications.