news

2/4/26 Same Bed Different Dreams is out in France—as 2333! It’s published by Actes Sud and translated by Stéphane Vanderhaeghe.

Photo: S.B.

2/2/26 AOHOA is on the longlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award!

1/24/26 AOHOA has been long listed for the British Science Fiction Association’s award for Best Collection! Great to see it alongside work by faves like Kristina Ten, John Langan, and Debbie Urbanski. (Vote here if you’re a member.) ¶ I’ve finished my 16-part look at the stories of An Oral History of Atlantis on Substack. This final installment looks back at the title story’s origins and publication journey, with glimpses of my uncollected stories and the now defunct journals they appeared in. A trip down memory lane. I’m not sure what will materialize on the Substack from here on in, save for the occasional piece “from the Parkhives.” Stay tuned!   

12/9/25 Shelf Awareness names AOHOA one of its Best Books of the Year: “Park writes books that are easy to love and hard to define…Highly satisfying.” ¶ The new Library Journal has a starred review for the AOHOA audiobook. I reproduce it here in full to tip my hat to some of the talented actors involved:  “It’s rare that a collection as varied as Park’s gets a voice cast to match; for this audiobook, nine narrators perform 16 stories. Several of them use unusual formats, such as ‘Slide to Unlock,’ narrated by Lee Osorio, which follows password tips and reminders to a shocking end. The opening story, ‘A Note to My Translator,’ performed by Raphael Corkhill, initially seems a righteously angry letter from an author but soon leaves listeners to ponder whether the work was always ‘crap’ writing. Even the stories told more traditionally, such as the Shannon Tyo–narrated ‘Watch Your Step,’ a tale of friendly spies, twine down to unexpected endings. One story, ‘Weird Menace,’ replicates the print version’s on-page split formatting by having both Raymond J. Lee and Gabrielle De Cuir narrate a Blu-ray commentary, complete with soundtrack music, drunken tangents, and muffled dialog in the background. The breadth of experiences Park captures with his writing will spawn endless book club debates about which story should be the favorite…VERDICT: Listeners will love that so much care and thought was clearly integral to the creation of this audio experience.” ¶ Thanks to producer Brady Emerson, as well as the other actors: Arthur Morey (“An Accurate Account”), the great Cindy Cheung (“Well-Moistened…,” “The Gift”), Peter Cross (“The Air as Air,” “Eat Pray Click”), and Jamie K. Brown (“Thought and Memory”). ¶ Trivia: Shannon Tyo was the voice of the KPG in Same Bed.

12/2/25 Happy to see AOHOA on LitHub‘s list of 2025 favorites: “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…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.”…The Speculative Shelf puts AOHOA in second place…Coming soon: Three Tenses!

11/21/25 Electric Literature names AOHOA one of the top five story collections of the year: “Park approaches the mundanity of contemporary life with humor, absurdity, speculation, and nods to his genre influences…”

11/17/25 AOHOA is a Booklist Editors’ Choice for 2025: “Park infuses his debut story collection with the same extraordinary inventiveness that made his novel Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) a Pulitzer Prize finalist, deftly upending quotidian expectations, encouraging discomfort, and presenting surreality with biting humor.”

11/12/25 AOHOA is one of Time‘s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Hamilton Cain writes: “Park…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. ..he’s a poet of the heart as well as an intellectual archivist, his commitment to art captured in inventive forms.”

10/19/25 I loved being included in Tim Teeman’s NYT roundup of favorite Pynchon moments. Other participants included William Gibson, Rachel Kushner, Ishmael Reed, and The Simpsons (!). The three lines by DeLillo at the end are magnificent, like a haiku…A while back, I did interviews with the Rumpus (about AOHOA) and Butler U.’s Booth (about SBDD)—they’re out now…

9/22/25 A fun interview with Matt Rodbard for the TASTE podcast—I sound like a foodie! My thoughts on NYC Korean restaurants, then and now, and gustatory inspirations for several of the stories in AOHOA…At Electric Literature: I’m happy to be the debut subject of their 23 Questions feature…Some new dates added to the tour schedule, including talks at Union College, Yale, and NYU….Substacking continues apace!

8/15/25 I’m happy to announce that I will receive the 2025 Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space on October 20. If you’re in New York in October, please consider purchasing a ticket, which will support A Public Space and all the incredible work they do, on the page and beyond…I was on WFMU’s Techtonic recently, talking to host Mark Hurst about the stories, techno-nostalgia, and more—a really fun interview.

8/11/25 I’ve started a Substack, called the Dizzies, in which I’ll tell the stories behind the stories of An Oral History of Atlantis. I’ll also open up the Parkhives, featuring essays I’ve published over the years, and feature some original fiction along the way. 

7/30/25 An Oral History of Atlantis is out! It was SRO at McNally Jackson Seaport for the launch event last night with the great Rachel Aviv. Thanks so much to everyone who came out!

Photo: Ellen Umansky

Lots of exciting new reviews are out: Lydia Millet (!) in the New York Times, Jake Casella Brookins in the Chicago Review of Books, and Siddhartha Mahanta in the Washington Post…Plus interviews with Lit Hub, Lit Hub again, Poets & Writers, and the West Side Rag, for which I once took a photograph of a couch in a tree on West 95th Street.

7/25/25 Hamilton Cain, who reviewed SBDD for the New York Times, heads for the other coast to file a terrific piece on AOHOA in the Los Angeles Times. It begins: “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”…Speaking of L.A., David Ulin made AOHOA a summer book pick on KCRW: “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.”…Vanity Fair names AOHOA one of 8 “books to read this summer,” with its “droll and lucid bites of life.”

7/20/25 Great review by Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal: “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 the three authors discussed here is to find a literary scene in a state of rude health.”…I enjoyed returning to the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast—listen here!…Lit With Charles was also fun…Some fun AOHOA–inspired sketches at Project POTUS Pages.

6/12/25 Great to see this starred Library Journal review:  “Startlingly original…Park’s antecedents are writers like Julio Cortazar and David Markson, which is high praise.” Plus some nice notices in the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe. 

5/16/25 AOHOA is one of The Atlantic‘s books to get lost in this summer: “Park, the author of two approachable surreal novels, sends his reader on a set of mind-opening trips…Even when he writes about mundane experiences, he is taking us someplace new.”

3/21/25 Exciting news! My fourth book (and first memoir), Three Tenses, will be published by Random House next year.

3/6/25 I’ve been named a recipient of a 2025 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

1/27/25 SBDD is the winner of the 2025 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature! “A hypnotic blend of genres and timelines…[Park’s] masterful weaving of divergent lives and alternate histories will astonish readers.”

1/16/25 A good convo about the art life with my old friend Brandon Stosuy at The Creative Independent.

12/11/24 The Buffalo News tracks the presence of its city in SBDD, which it calls “wildly imaginative and immensely fun to read, with writing as sharp as a skate blade”…The New Republic names SBDD one of its Books of the Year.

11/18/24 Thomas Kohnstamm praises SBDD in the Seattle Times. “Park’s book, he says, ‘proves again that the novel will never die.’”…For The Week, I pick six recent books I enjoyed.

10/30/24 Back in 2020, I discovered a strange manuscript…one that I had written and lost. Read “Beautiful Plan of Your Future” in the latest issue of The Baffler.

10/12/24 Han Kang, the South Korean author of The Vegetarian, Human Acts, and other novels, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Atlantic asked me for some thoughts.

10/2/24 Check out Hingston & Olsen’s 2024 Short Story Advent Calendar, packaged in a beautiful box and featuring stories by me and 24 other writers. (The idea is to read one story-pamphlet a day beginning December 1.)

9/19/24 My memoir-y review of Tricia Romano’s The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, just came out in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. I worked at the Voice from 1994 to 2006, and actually interned and did some temping at Harper’s in 1992 and then 1993–4, so this is a very special piece and venue for me.

8/29/24 Late summer roundup! An epic review of SBDD in the New York Review of Books, by Charlie Lee. I love this: “Echo’s writing works on Soon like a slowly enveloping dream, a seductive scrambling of all he once knew about Korea. The effect on the reader is similarly disorienting. 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”…Earlier this year, Lauren Blackman spoke to me for The Daily Princetonian, and Evelyn Ch’ien interviewed me for ZYZZYVA…As for me, I wrote a Bookforum  review on the conclusion of Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters.

5/9/24 My story “The Wife on Ambien,” originally published in The New Yorker, is read by actor John Fugelsang for WNYC’s Selected Shorts.

5/6/24 Same Bed Different Dreams is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize! The judges described it as:

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 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”).