Ed Park's Blog, page 2
February 16, 2024
Bonkers!
It's been approximately 2 million years since I've posted, but I thought I'd mention this for any audiobook fans out there: Late last year, the NYT Book Review named SBDD one of the five best audiobooks of the year! For some reason, the piece only came out in the paper, so it wasn't easy to share. Anyway — to my surprise, the audiobook review (by Lauren Christensen) popped up online https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/bo..., with some wonderfully loopy artwork. Here's what Christensen writes:
Intertwining the very real past of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground government and a far-reaching parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”
But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the varied narrative prowess of the audiobook’s three narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the narrative signposts we can get in this vertiginous maze that winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.
Park’s novel braids together three separate narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American employee of a fictional technology conglomerate called GLOAT who becomes obsessed with an unfinished manuscript that mysteriously falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of supposed nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive/real/a restaurant deliveryman; Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black Korean War veteran and former P.O.W. living in Buffalo. Characters, too, repeat throughout, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they came.
That’s OK; the point isn’t to grasp every minute detail, pinning it to your mental bulletin board with thumbtacks and a network of strings. The fun in this audiobook comes not from solving the riddles of the past, but from the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life collide headfirst into heartfelt and hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life.
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My initial book tour wrapped up in January, but I'm still doing about an event a month for the near future. I'll be at UC Irvine on Tuesday, February 20, and at Harvard's Korea Institute on Monday, March 4. For more information, go to my website, https://ed-park.com.
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Also, I've enjoyed writing the occasional TinyLetter, but that service is shutting down. Should I do a Substack? Mailchimp? Call it a day?
*
Hope everyone's doing okay. Thanks for reading!
Ed
Intertwining the very real past of Korean colonization and American imperialism with speculative plots involving an underground government and a far-reaching parasitic tech company, Ed Park’s second novel, “Same Bed Different Dreams,” hits you over the head with the blunt force of its organizing quandary, again and again: “What is history?”
But thanks to the ingenuity of Park’s storytelling and the varied narrative prowess of the audiobook’s three narrators, Daniel K. Isaac, Dominic Hoffman and Shannon Tyo, the listener doesn’t mind the repetition. If anything, we need all the narrative signposts we can get in this vertiginous maze that winds through alternate histories, dreamlike impossibilities and books within books.
Park’s novel braids together three separate narratives that overlap in sometimes rewarding, sometimes confounding ways. Isaac reads “The Sins,” about a Korean American employee of a fictional technology conglomerate called GLOAT who becomes obsessed with an unfinished manuscript that mysteriously falls into his hands; Tyo reads the manuscript itself, a translated work of supposed nonfiction by Echo, the nom de plume of an elusive Korean writer who may or may not be alive/real/a restaurant deliveryman; Hoffman reads “2333,” a science fiction series by a Black Korean War veteran and former P.O.W. living in Buffalo. Characters, too, repeat throughout, tempting the listener to draw connections that prove so tenuous they vanish as quickly as they came.
That’s OK; the point isn’t to grasp every minute detail, pinning it to your mental bulletin board with thumbtacks and a network of strings. The fun in this audiobook comes not from solving the riddles of the past, but from the hallucinatory joy of witnessing real life collide headfirst into heartfelt and hilarious nonsense. As in art, so in life.
*
My initial book tour wrapped up in January, but I'm still doing about an event a month for the near future. I'll be at UC Irvine on Tuesday, February 20, and at Harvard's Korea Institute on Monday, March 4. For more information, go to my website, https://ed-park.com.
*
Also, I've enjoyed writing the occasional TinyLetter, but that service is shutting down. Should I do a Substack? Mailchimp? Call it a day?
*
Hope everyone's doing okay. Thanks for reading!
Ed
November 4, 2023
"Welcome to Ed Park's Many-Layered World"
I woke up early Thursday to a wonderful review of SBDD in the New York Times. Hamilton Cain really got the book in a way that's supremely gratifying to me.
"It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches," he wrote, calling it a "sprawling, stunning novel."
The headline was very appealing, too.
Read it all here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/bo...
"It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches," he wrote, calling it a "sprawling, stunning novel."
The headline was very appealing, too.
Read it all here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/bo...
October 29, 2023
PW Top 10
There's just a little over a week until Same Bed Different Dreams is officially out. I was getting off a train on Friday in DC when I learned that Publishers' Weekly had announced its top 10 books of 2023—a list that included SBDD!
https://best-books.publishersweekly.c...
It's an exciting list — I was happy to see my friend and fellow Believer editor Andrew Leland's THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND here as well.
Thanks for reading, Goodreaders™!
Also, if you'd like to know more about my book, including events and BTS stuff, subscribe to my TinyLetter: https://tinyletter.com/EdPark.
https://best-books.publishersweekly.c...
It's an exciting list — I was happy to see my friend and fellow Believer editor Andrew Leland's THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND here as well.
Thanks for reading, Goodreaders™!
Also, if you'd like to know more about my book, including events and BTS stuff, subscribe to my TinyLetter: https://tinyletter.com/EdPark.
September 18, 2023
"Ed Park's Secret History": An interview with Publishers Weekly
I enjoyed talking to David Varno this summer; his interview with me is now up at Publishers Weekly:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...
And Booklist's Terry Hong gave SBDD a wonderful starred review, calling it "a 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."
https://www.booklistonline.com/Same-B...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/b...
And Booklist's Terry Hong gave SBDD a wonderful starred review, calling it "a 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."
https://www.booklistonline.com/Same-B...
August 23, 2023
New website and some early reviews
August is dwindling away. I hope summer has been good to you. I've returned to my blogging ways to let you know about my revamped website, which had been stuck in amber for about a dozen years. Please check it out at ed-park.com. (Same URL, different content.) It has some advance praise for SBDD from some of my favorite authors, including Dave Eggers, Cathy Park Hong, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Lethem, Ling Ma, Elizabeth McKenzie, Namwali Serpell, and Charles Yu; info on my other books; and the Parkhives—a selection of my various essays, articles, and short fiction from the past 9,000 years.
The novel comes out on November 7, but I'm thrilled to note two starred reviews, from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly:
"A brash, rangy, sui generis feat of speculative fiction."
—https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
"This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages."
—https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780...
The novel comes out on November 7, but I'm thrilled to note two starred reviews, from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly:
"A brash, rangy, sui generis feat of speculative fiction."
—https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...
"This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages."
—https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780...
June 7, 2023
SBDD giveaway!
Hey you!
It's June — time to enter to win a free print copy of my forthcoming novel, the gigantic SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS!
The contest ends on 6/30. (U.S. members only.) You can go to the Giveaways page, or click on the tab at the SBDD page. Good luck!
Ed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
It's June — time to enter to win a free print copy of my forthcoming novel, the gigantic SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS!
The contest ends on 6/30. (U.S. members only.) You can go to the Giveaways page, or click on the tab at the SBDD page. Good luck!
Ed
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...
