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Same Bed Different Dreams
From the acclaimed author of Personal Days, Same Bed Different Dreams is a raucously funny feat of imagination and a thrilling meld of history and fiction that pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A New York Times Notable Book • A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2023 • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Book of the Year • An Amazon Top 100 Book of the Year • A Los Angeles Times Best Novel of 2023 • A New York Times Top 5 Audiobook of the Year • An ALA Notable Book • An Indie Next Pick
In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.
But what if the KPG still existed—now working toward a unified Korea, secretly pulling levers to further its aims? Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.
Soon Sheen, a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT, comes into possession of an unfinished book seemingly authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a riveting revisionist history, connecting famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project—everyone from Syngman Rhee and architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, as are the Moonies and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Reagan-era downing of a passenger plane that puts the world on the brink of war.
Praise
“An inventive postmodern novel that moves from the brutal Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula to a lonely Korean American boy’s passion for the Buffalo Sabres, [with] interlinked narratives that jump historical and imaginary time zones with humor, sorrow and irreverence.” —Pulitzer Prize, finalist citation
“Ed Park’s phenomenal novel Same Bed Different Dreams takes on the question, ‘What is history?’ and examines it from all angles, then turns it inside out and switches dimensions. The novel’s innovative form matches the subjects it explores. A multifarious reimagining of Korean and American history, the novel unfolds through intertwined strands. Sprawling, layering, and expanding, the stories in the novel connect directly and indirectly, nest inside each other, and reflect one another, like evolving networks. Park seamlessly blends reality with the imagination, capturing the jittery paranoia of internet conspiracies, where even the most tenuous connections are significant, and obscure texts abound with coincidences, echoes, puns, and acronyms. The novel gives the sensation of many things at once: an ouroboros, a dream inside of a dream, a trip across the uncanny valley. As playful as it is moving, as serious as it is otherworldly, and as funny as it is intellectually stimulating, Same Bed Different Dreams is a work of singular ambition and literary power.” —Judges’ citation, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
“Brilliant…Park is not writing a historical novel, hoping to dramatize some episode or series of episodes in the past. He is building an alternate history of Korea and its relationship to the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, telling a story by mining and transforming the historical record. And it begins with a question that returns again and again, until it is almost like a chant in a protest: What is history?” —Alexander Chee, The New Republic
“I can’t think of a novel I’ve read recently with more continuous pleasure than #edpark’s #samebeddifferentdreams. I read it with a gameplayer’s thrill of new synapses forming as previously unsuspected connections snap into place, with the sobering joy of contact with a grandmaster mind. It’s witty, deadpan-yet-scintillating, but it also convincingly traffics in pain and loss and tragedy, horrors large and small, without getting mired in them, without losing hope or its sure artistic footing. First book in ages that I wanted to go back and immediately start reading again.” —Michael Chabon, from Instagram
“Such a good title, for starters.” —Fiona Maazel, Bookforum
“Park has a satirical cast of mind, rooted in an exuberant sensitivity to the habits and lazy rituals of people on autopilot, and even more so to the language they use…The initial impression when reading his fiction is almost always of a writer at play….Park’s work in the imposing tradition of the American systems novel, and particularly that of its high priests, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon….[Echo’s] book is that rare thing, a novel-within-a-novel that is as engrossing and powerful for the actual reader as it is purported to be for the characters.” —Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books
“Intricate and entertaining…expansive and allusive…Immensely fun and inventive.” —LOCUS
“It’s a feat of a novel which uses its converging narratives and massive research scope to touch on Korean history, American sci-fi, Buffalo hockey, literary resentments, and so many more miraculously intersecting threads—some true, some imagined. An ambitious and absorbing universe of its own, akin to the best of Bolaño or Pynchon.” —Sadie Dupuis (Speedy Ortiz), DIY
“Mind-bending…Weaves in plot threads involving big tech and science fiction, and like a particularly feverish Philip K. Dick or Thomas Pynchon yarn, Bed is constantly questioning the nature of the reality we think we know…The book is rooted in beautifully rendered characters, whose tales of separation and division mirror Korea‘s own complex history.” —Mark Athitakis, Los Angeles Times (one of the year’s 13 best novels)
“In this novel…history is alive: It is an overflowing conversation that never ends….A vivid palimpsest of the country’s past and present.” —Krys Lee, The Atlantic
“It’s fitting, in this year devoted to recasting history, that two of the best novels were meditations on the ambiguities of recollection…Wildly inventive…The heightened, sometimes hilarious bewilderment adds poignancy to the book’s repeatedly asked refrain, ‘What is history?’” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Intricate and revelatory…Although Same Bed Different Dreams is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory, the reader is never confused about what’s happening in the practical sense. The path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make “Same Bed Different Dreams” succeed so powerfully.” —Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times
“Park returns 15 years after Personal Days with an ingenious postmodern epic of colonial and postcolonial Korea framed in a satire of America’s publishing and tech industries…Wizardly, funny, lyrical, poignant…This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review (full review)
“Imagine an enclosed cylinder at the base of which is a cell that contains filaments, fragments, and at the top of which is an aperture. You look inside and you see: History. Numerology. A flag. A gun. Dreams. Faith. Fingers. A diagonal of dots. UFOs. Puns. Race. A yin yang. A face. A folder icon. A movie reel. Smoke. Love. Beauty. Resistance. The filaments shimmer. Now twist. Same Bed, Different Dreams is a kaleidoscope of Koreamerica; a crowd of cracked voices; a gorgeous, hilarious, provisional dream; a wonder.”
—Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows
“This is a book of dizzying scope and erudition, which wraps its arms around the last hundred-plus years of Korean and Korean American history. At the same time, it manages to be very funny, very intimate and playful, and interested in basic questions of existence, beginning with, ‘Why are we here and what gives us meaning?’ You will not find a more impossible-to-categorize book this year.”
—Dave Eggers, author of The Circle
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings
“Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered by Ed Park’s mysterious and panoramic novel. Same Bed Different Dreams seems to draw on Bolaño and Pynchon and Helen DeWitt for its radical, centrifugal structure and style, yet remains grounded in a droll sweet voice we’ve wished to hear again ever since Personal Days. This is a Gravity’s Rainbow for another war, an unfinished war. Having been enlisted in the Korean Provisional Government, I now await my instructions.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn
“I could not stop reading, thinking, and dreaming about Same Bed Different Dreams . . . A feverish, mind-altering marvel of a book.”
—Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Stay True
(Psst! Listen to Hua’s SBDD soundtrack here.)
“A deeply original work from a brilliant and assured voice, Same Bed Different Dreams is a novel to get lost in, a novel of discoveries, a synthesis of history and speculation, a feat of imagination. I read it with awe and admiration for its construction, and for the sheer pleasure of its language.”—Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown
“Totally astounding. Same Bed Different Dreams emits a prismatic intelligence operating on multiple frequencies. It’s funny, melancholic, and strange. I didn’t know I’d been waiting for a book like this until I encountered it.” —Ling Ma, author of Severance and Bliss Montage
“Belongs in the company of a rare few dark and comic masterpieces of invention. It disarmed me with sheer delight.”
—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen and The Dog of the North
“Witty and inventive…Park’s alternate history is written with a dedication to invented facts rivaling Biography of X and The Man in the High Castle. Hurry to snatch a copy, then take your time so you don’t miss all the Easter eggs.”
–Janet Manley, Lit Hub
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of Why Writing Matters