Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties

An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life,

In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.

The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the page: within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.

Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

Praise

“Those little, perfect lyrical bursts of prose accrue in the reader’s mind in interesting ways. Though the pieces hopscotch back and forth across the world, our innate mammalian sense of pattern recognition highlights themes and locations and situations that recur in the prose. We begin to piece together a narrative portrait of the novelist as a young man, gathering the pieces of him that he has scattered through time and space.” —Paul Constant, The Seattle Times

“Stray musings and recollections reveal a writer’s restless mind in this scintillating memoir. . . . Ruminations and insights . . . coalesce to illuminate his endlessly curious, mordantly funny worldview. It adds up to an engrossing and beguiling trip through the consciousness of a budding wordsmith.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Subversively funny…An exquisitely well-written entertainment.” —Kirkus

“In this work, which defies easy categorization, Park revisits writing he had long believed lost, a collection of essays, experiments, ‘an autobiography with lies.’ Grappling with his own earlier self, the current Park ponders how an artist develops a unique point of view, a voice that can be heard.” —The Boston Globe