NEW!  4/20/24 Same Bed Different Dreams is the winner of the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction!

The 2023 Fiction Prize Judging Committee’s citation reads:

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.

3/18/24 A smart review in Spectrum Culture: “Taking inspiration from Pynchon, Cronenberg, DeLillo, Egan, Jin, Ishiguro, Spiotta and Bolaño, among others, Same Bed Different Dreams…is concerned with the nature of history – not only how the record of the past is formed, but who shapes it and what they include..” ¶ I contributed two appreciations (on Younghill Kang’s East Goes West and Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South) to The Atlantic‘s conversation-starting list of Great American Novels.

3/6/24 Alisyn Amant spent months writing this in-depth profile of me, now up at The Brooklyn Rail. ¶ On his Substack, Alexander Chee gives the BTS for his New Republic review.

2/22/24 SBDD is a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize! ¶ In LOCUS, Jake Casella Brookins reviews SBDD: “Immensely fun and entertaining…Soon’s Hudson Valley, Jotter’s Buffalo, and the KPG’s much-contested Korea (and many locations further afield) are all deeply grounded—rather than dispelling the stranger, more nebulous and fantastic aspects of the novel, they emphasize them, enable them. It’s a masterful and unpredictable work, and highly recommended.” ¶ This weekend, I’ll be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s BETA—listen!

2/20/24 In The New Republic, Alexander Chee has an epic review: “It’s not just that you’re being told secret knowledge, but you’re being admitted to a secret circle. The true and the fictional blend, as the different parallel fictions do, until the novel has the feeling of a production by one of those traveling Shakespeare companies with just a few actors who take on all of the many different roles—but on a vast world-altering scale.” ¶ The NYTBR reviews the audiobook, under the headline “This Novel Is So Bonkers, It Needs Three Narrators.” ¶ I talked with KBS World’s Korea 24…

1/25/24 I talk to the Fiction/Non/Fiction Podcast, about Koreas real and imagined ¶ SBDD is an ALA Notable book.

12/29/23 How about an interview roundup? I talk to Life on Books (podcast and video), the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Interview (with Gabriel Bump) ¶ In non-SBDD news, my story “The Air as Air” is in the new McSweeney’s (#72)! ¶ SBDD is an NYT Editor’s Choice ¶ Sam Sacks at the Wall Street Journal calls it “wildly inventive,” a “dizzying canvas” of a “meta-historical” novel.

12/18/23 Novelist Krys Lee reviews SBDD for The Atlantic (“In this novel, history is alive: It is an overflowing conversation that never ends”) ¶ On WABE (Atlanta), bookseller Matt Nixon names SBDD as his favorite book of the year ¶ Nerdette also picks it as a best book of 2023 (“It’s not short, but it’s fun”).

12/13/23 The New York Times Book Review picks SBDD as one of its five best audiobooks of the year! (You can find it on all your favorite platforms.) The three threads are read by three terrific actors: Dominic Hoffman (2333), Daniel K. Isaac (The Sins), and Shannon Tyo (the Dreams)¶ Lincoln Michel gets me to spill some craft beans over on his Substack.

12/8/23 I talk to David Gordon for BOMB, in a wide-ranging interview! (I was David’s editor in a past life) ¶ Fiona Maazel has a zesty review of SBDD in Bookforum (“I attempted to take notes, to map out family trees and how the characters relate to each other. And then I just gave up because the storytelling here is so good I quit trying to solve it all”)…and Polygon names SBDD one of the best sci-fi books of 2023!

12/5/23 The Los Angeles Times names SBDD one of its “Best 13 Novels” of the year! “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.”

11/30/23 Listen to me on B&N’s Poured Over podcast. (You can also watch the video—recorded before an audience at the Upper West Side branch.) ¶ The Washington Post says, “The prose moves through the material like an Olympic diver slicing into the water, swift and splashless.”

11/21/23 SBDD is a New York Times Notable Book of 2023! ¶ The Typewriter Revolution blog features some of my typewritten notes and an unused draft page of SBDD.

11/16/23 SBDD named one of the ten best fiction books of 2023 by Kirkus, and the Washington Post calls it one of the year’s notable fiction titles and says it’s “supremely cool…eye-popping” ¶ I’m on The Maris Review ¶ The Life on Books podcast devotes an entire episode on SBDD.

11/13/23 “Dreams are everything that’s not online”: Listen to an in-depth interview with WFMU’s Techtonic show ¶ Couch memories in the West Side Rag ¶ The OC Register surveys SBDD’s pop culture…

11/6/23 A terrific review in the Los Angeles Times by John Russell Clark reads: “Although [this] is one of the most circuitously structured novels in recent memory […] the path is always clear. It’s the connections between the disparate parts that make [SBDD] succeed so powerfully yet enigmatically.”

“Welcome to Ed Park’s Many-Layered World.” In The New York Times Book Review, Hamilton Cain raves: “Lush, labyrinthine…It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches…[SBDD] struts confidently across registers — lyrical, deadpan, acerbic, comedic…[A] sprawling, stunning novel.”

Another starred pre-pub review, this time from Library Journal: “A form of dreaming that elicits connections across space and time and brings readers into a focused experience of cyclical existence across a constantly repopulated world stage…This playfully serious must-read is highly recommended.”

10/27/23 Publishers Weekly has chosen Same Bed Different Dreams as one of its top 10 books of 2023! “[A] triumphant postmodern masterpiece, which is also a hilarious send-up of publishing and a moving portrait of the Korean diaspora.”

“13 Fall Books for Food Lovers to Devour”: Anna Hezel digs into SBDD for Bon Appetit. Also: Thank you, Scientific American and Vanity Fair!

10/16/23 Check out this Goodreads giveaway—win a finished copy of SBDD!

SBDD is the November selection for Third Place Books’ Signed First Editions Club. Robert Sindelar calls it “a wild, disorienting, non-stop journey that is as thrilling and comical as it is thoughtful and hypnotic.” I’m looking forward to signing 150 copies of SBDD in Seattle!

SBDD has been selected for November’s Indie Next list! Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books calls it “a monumentally funny and epically mind bending novel that opens doors you may never have even realized were doors.” Bill Carl at An Unlikely Story says, “I will be thinking about this novel for months and probably also dreaming about it.”

9/19/23 Booklist‘s Terry Hong gives SBDD a starred review: “Stupendous…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.”

9/12/23 “The Underworld of Korean history”: A talk with David Varno for Publishers Weekly.

8/30/23 Great to see these starred reviews from Publishers Weekly (“This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages”) and Kirkus (“a compassionate study of how much we inherit culturally from the past, and how we’re connected to it more deeply than we’re inclined to think”). K