Editorial Content for An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories

In the story “Eat Pray Click,” one of 16 in his strikingly original collection, AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, Ed Park’s narrator describes a character as someone who “didn’t like that books started on the first page and ended on the last.” That single sentence provides a window into the sensibility that animates these consistently surprising stories and makes the collection as a whole an almost unalloyed delight.

In a 2025 interview, Park --- a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS; a former editor at the Village Voice; and a contributor to publications that include The New Yorker and McSweeney’s, where some of these stories first appeared --- explains that the ones collected here represent his favorites from work extending over more than 25 years. “I can see myself trying to be alive on the page,” he observes. “And in most cases, be funny. Almost like trying to take however bad the situation was for me professionally and find the silver lining, find a way to laugh at it, and in a way, transcend it.”

"For all of Park’s humor and narrative tricks, and the undercurrent of weirdness that runs through many of the tales, there’s an essential pulse of humanity that sustains the collection and makes reading it a consistent source of pleasure."

Readers who enjoy the short fiction of writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders, Karen Russell and Aimee Bender are likely to recognize a kindred spirit in Park. He moves easily from contemporary settings that are readily recognizable to others with a certain dystopian quality that lends the stories he fashions in them a certain vertiginous feeling. In either case, an undercurrent of dry humor courses through the entire collection.

Many of Park’s stories involve writers or other creative types, as in the wry opener, “A Note to My Translator,” a brief, sustained howl of frustration from a writer named Hans de Krap. After detailing a set of inexplicable changes inflicted on his work, Mexican Fruitcake (as “E.,” the translator, somehow has rendered the title), he complains that “[o]nly ten pages into my novel and already all seems lost.”

In “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” the unnamed narrator (Park has a preference for the first person), who’s been publishing a secret blog for two years that attracts three readers per week, is in a relationship with a woman named Tabitha Grammaticus. She reviews science fiction while running a heroic fantasy website, and he fears she is “turning into an alien.” The incomprehensible excerpt he reads from a review copy she gives him as a birthday gift fully justifies his frustration and anxiety.

“An Accurate Account” is written in the form of a letter from a writer, Quinn, to his nephew (also named Quinn), an aspiring playwright. The writer describes himself as the “pioneer of the postmodern twist ending,” and the story delivers on that promise. “The Gift,” which revolves around a former student’s account of a strange semester in a community college seminar on aphorisms led by Professor Dublinski, named “hottest prof three years running,” likewise offers a satisfying twist in its final sentence.

“Thought and Memory” also features a novelist narrator, enduring a West Coast tour for his first novel, A Tree Grows in Baghdad. It includes a lunch stop at a “locavore haunt” in Portland, Oregon, featuring “seafood haggis and artisanal jelly beans” and a reading in Berkeley at a “transgender open mic at a bookstore that isn’t one of those legendary Berkeley bookstores.” Throughout, he agonizes over writing a letter to a woman named Mercy Pang in which he aches to articulate his struggle not to lie about the comical true reason for his time in Iraq.

One of the most inventive stories is “Weird Menace,” a conversation in the form of a commentary track to a Blu-ray version of a bizarre 1980s science fiction movie of that name. It features the director, Toner Low, who admits that “I directed that piece of crap,” and Barbara Lee Handbook, who stars as the character Lieutenant Carapace of the 124th Interstellar Battalion. As the two banter wildly about the film, its crazy awfulness (think Plan 9 from Outer Space) becomes ever more apparent.

As one would expect, not all of the stories here match the high standards of Park’s best ones. That’s true of “Slide to Unlock,” a brief sketch of a character struggling to remember a password. The need for him to do that emerges on the story’s final page. “The Wife on Ambien,” in which most of the paragraphs begin with that phrase, comprises the narrator’s loosely connected series of observations about his spouse’s extreme behavior under the influence of the drug. In all, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The volume’s title story, set in a Manhattan that “blew up every bridge, back when they thought rats spread the dread virus MtPR, pronounced “Metaphor,” cries out for further development.

For all of Park’s humor and narrative tricks, and the undercurrent of weirdness that runs through many of the tales, there’s an essential pulse of humanity that sustains the collection and makes reading it a consistent source of pleasure. Park is a supremely talented and often daring writer, and anyone encountering him here for the first time is almost certain to go looking for more of his work.