An Oral History of Atlantis
Stories

Quotes

“By turns tongue-in-cheek, elegiac, dreamlike and magical-realist . . . an ode to imagination.”—The Washington Post

“[Park] revels in the shorter form, a palpable joy on the page. Irony has never had it so good.”—Los Angeles Times

“Capsules of wit . . . What these stories have in common is their playful, arty milieu and a sense of encodedness. Language and culture are ciphers that can never be fully broken; the slippery elusiveness of their multiple meanings is meaning enough.”—The New York Times

“A delectable collection of linked stories, a cocktail of his obsessions: experimental language, pop-culture oddities, screwball characters, cutting-edge technologies, and political conflicts across the globe. Yet he’s a poet of the heart as well as an intellectual archivist, his commitment to art captured in inventive forms.”—TIME

“To speak of Park’s creativity is also to speak of his humanity—empathy is a function of the imagination, of course, and it makes sense that a mind capable of dreaming these worlds and sister verses would also be able to endow them with spirits as vivid and complex as our own.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“What’s the collective noun for a school of stories so bright and brilliant, they ripple with humor, compassion, and wonder? Call them an ‘Ed Park.’ An Oral History of Atlantis will continue to delight us, long after the flood.”—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“These stories explore the multiplicity of time and space—artistic, historical, and psychological—and confront once and again the shapeshifting border between reality and unreality. With sly humor and deep understanding, Park makes the reader laugh from disquiet, and tear up from being seen.”—Yiyun Li, author of Wednesday’s Child

“Funny, tragic, winsome screwball science-fiction prose poetry of ‘maximum lexical density’ that’s pure pleasure to read.”—Sarah Manguso, author of Liars

“An Oral History of Atlantis is a snapshot of who we are and where we are as well as an offbeat map to where we might dare to go. The stories are mordant, inventive, heartbreaking, and above all else, profoundly human, and I’m already looking forward to a re-read.”—Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of Horror Movie

“The James Joyce of Korean-American literature, and of our times.”—Ilyon Woo, author of Master Slave Husband Wife

“Park’s delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers’ minds for a long time.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Park infuses his debut story collection with the same extraordinary inventiveness that made his novel Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) a Pulitzer Prize finalist.”—Booklist, starred review