An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories

A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

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 moviestar 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 Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, 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 fifteen 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, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, was named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and was a New York Times Notable Book; and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Vice, Harvard Review, and other periodicals and anthologies, and he writes regularly for The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, and elsewhere. Ed was a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Voice Literary Supplement, and has also worked in publishing. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family, and currently teaches writing at Princeton University.