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An Oral History of Atlantis
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • 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 movie star 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 sixteen 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.
Praise
New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award • Time Must-Read Book of 2025 • Boston Globe Best Book of 2025• NPR Book We Love • LitHub Favorite Book of 2025 • Reactor Best Book of 2025• Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year • Electric Literature Short Story Collection of the Year • Booklist Editors’ Choice of 2025 • Library Journal Best Book (Stellar Selection) of 2025 • Speculative Shelf Top 10 Book of the Year • Longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection
“A genre-bender that I am begging SF readers to pick up: incredibly funny, charming, and constantly clever, with some really delightful love letters to odd corners of the genre. It’s also powerfully weird; some of its strongest stories aren’t easy to classify as science fiction or fantasy, but have a kind of potent, startling ambiguity that has had me pressing it on people since I encountered it.” —Jake Casella Brookins, “The Year in Review 2025,” LOCUS
“A stone-cold assassin targets her college friend. A pair of Hollywood B-listers look back at a pulp film they’d made in the 1980s, with disastrous results. A reunion between father and son summons complicated feelings for both men. An archeological team of 18 women, all named Tina, excavates a mysterious site on a floating island in the Pacific Ocean. Park, a Pulitzer finalist for his mind-bending political novel, Same Bed Different Dreams, here serves up 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.” —Hamilton Cain, Time
“Simply put, this is the best short story collection of the year.” —Parnassus Books
“Exuberant…These are comedies of embarrassment, but happily there is no embarrassment to the comedy, no leavening of the gags and witticisms with serious issues. It is easy to become demoralized by American fiction, which sometimes seems to be exclusively tailored to celebrity book clubs. But to read [Park] is to find a literary scene in a state of rude health.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“In these stories, Park plays with the breadth of emotions from joy to dread seamlessly. I often found myself laughing one minute and crying the next…Captivating…The moment I surrendered control, I saw this collection for what it was: a voyage into the brilliant, weird, and hilarious mind of Ed Park. And I loved every bit of it.” —Helen Rhee, Reactor
“With each wry, understated sentence, sparkling with his love of wordplay and studded with in-jokes and literary references, you feel your amusement meter fixed at a setting of “low, rumbly lol,” with occasional spikes to ‘lmao.’…Despite the sense of longing that hangs over these stories, Park remains curious about what we might gain in an age of digital reconstitution. A certain level of deception and subterfuge is simply at the core of how we live now. Rather than raging against that fact, Park examines the myriad ways to get by in a world defined by collective dissimulation—to muddle and manage even as our shared conditions degrade and shame us. Because who knows: Simply carrying on in these strange new times may inspire us enough to eventually make us whole.”—Siddhartha Manta, The Washington Post
“Capsules of wit…The introductory story, ‘A Note to My Translator,’ is a critique by a disgruntled novelist of an arbitrary translation of one of his books. His lofty, antiquated diction and ego reminded me instantly of Charles Kinbote, the deranged scholar-narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire…Reminiscent of Italo Calvino or Kathryn Davis, as if we’re hovering over an amorphous landscape with signposts written in runes.” —Lydia Millet, The New York Times
“I’ll throw my gauntlet down and say that Ed Park is the funniest prose writer in America. There isn’t a novelist I know of who can match his ability with jokes, callbacks, and anagrams. Park’s wordplay is unsurpassed…If you’re a reader who wants to be dazzled or a writer who wants to be inspired, I can’t recommend this collection more highly.” —James Folta, LitHub
“My favorite collection…I found myself laughing out loud…Word-loving, mind-altering stories.” —Susan Balée, The Hudson Review
“For all his wit, Park has plenty of soul. His structural hijinks…Park reels us in with the wild details, the strange names, and the cool sense of humor, but then proceeds to poke us in the gut as his characters navigate loneliness, vanity, insecurity, and general bewilderment with life in a world of exponential technology…I will be thinking of these stories for a long time to come.” —Megan Peck Shub, Story
“Realism may still command the heights of American fiction, but insurgents are in it to win it. With titans such as Pynchon and DeLillo in their late 80s, now comes a generation captained by Ed Park…After the ornate sprawl of the novel, he revels in the shorter form, a palpable joy on the page. Irony has never had it so good.” —Hamilton Cain, Los Angeles Times
“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 sisterverses would also be able to endow them with spirits as vivid and complex as our own. It’s dazzling, this steady carousel of delight and stunned awe. Park is one of the funniest writers working today, and among the most humane.” —Kaveh Akbar, New York Times–bestselling author of Martyr!
“Always witty, sometimes surreal, frequently diving beneath mundane surfaces to mysterious and mesmerizing depths […] the first collection of Ed Park’s short stories showcases a master of the form.” —Jake Casella Brookins, Chicago Review of Books
“Readers will recognize the same playful wit and eclectic, occasionally challenging style that animate his two novels, including the 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams. But unlike that book, which pulls from Korea’s past for a grandly wrought alternative history, the stories in Atlantis live squarely in our own absurd present, a workaday wonderland where lives can be told in sleep-medication side effects and Internet login passwords.” —Colin Dwyer, NPR
“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.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (★ starred review)
“The James Joyce of Korean-American literature, and of our times.” —Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife
“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 and A Head Full of Ghosts
“Ed Park writes books that are easy to love and hard to define. His writing is hilarious but also serious; chaotic while still cohesive; irreverent and earnest all at once…[A] sense of longing for something just out of reach is the thread that binds Park’s stories—to each other and to the reader.” —Shelf Awareness (2025 Best Books of the Year)
“In this delightfully strange collection of 16 shorts, mundane moments and hugely significant events are presented with equal parts wit and compassion.” —“Best Books of July 2025,“ People
“Ed Park is a magician of storytelling. 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
“One of the things that I find consistently astonishing about his work is the way that he’s always exploding lines, exploding genre distinctions, creating a really interesting weave…Really smart, really playful.” —David Ulin, Press Play, KCRW
“A witty, insightful collection of short stories that explores the absurdity of modern life. In ‘Weird Menace,’ a film director and an aging movie star record a commentary about a movie neither really remembers making. ‘Slide to Unlock’ finds a man trying to remember his various passwords—and make sense of the life he’s led.” —New York Post
“Startlingly original…Park’s antecedents are writers like Julio Cortazar and David Markson, which is high praise.—Library Journal (★ starred review)
“One thing I’ve learned from his first two books: Ed Park’s up to something. Just what it is, well that’s for the reader to stumble upon and, for me at least, love every bungling minute of….Often oddly self-referential, often levelheadedly off-kilter, often softened by its own bite, these humorous shorts will come back to you the next day to make you say “hey, wait… ha.’” —The Southern Bookseller Review
“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
“In his new story collection, Park, the author of two approachably surreal novels, sends his reader on a set of mind-opening trips, drawing absurd connections and inventing wacky situations: A narrator’s girlfriend insists on wearing a ‘housecoat’ at home—a ‘sort of down-filled poncho with stirrups’; a man turns on his laptop one day to see his ex-wife walking across the screen. These oddball scenarios may make you laugh, but they can just as easily have you questioning your place in the universe. In ‘Machine City,’ an undergrad is fascinated by meta works of art—books within books, smaller paintings depicted within larger ones. He wonders whether the ‘interior’ work is less authentic than the one in which it’s embedded. And if a painting can contain a painter painting another painting, ‘could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God?’ He can’t stop asking himself these kinds of questions, which won’t help him get into law school. Even when Park writes about mundane experiences—his stories chronicle time spent online, on college campuses, and in post-divorce apartments—he is taking us someplace new.” — Maya Chung, The Atlantic
“Deeply original, funny, and absurd.” —Town & Country
“Park infuses his debut story collection with the same extraordinary inventiveness that made his novel Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) a Pulitzer Prize finalist … Throughout his 16 stories, [he] deftly upends quotidian expectations, encourages discomfort, and presents surreality with biting humor.”
—Booklist (★ starred review)
“Funny, tragic, winsome screwball science-fiction prose poetry of ‘maximum lexical density’ that’s pure pleasure to read.”
—Sarah Manguso, author of Liars
“[Park looks] for the ways that human idiosyncrasies manage to poke up to the surface even while technology tries to keep us tidy and algorithm friendly … A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.” —Kirkus