AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, Ed Park's story collection spanning 25 years-plus

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS
ED PARK
Random House
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I have not highlighted that could make a difference to your pleasure...or not...is something I didn't notice until after I read the whole collection: There seems to be interconnection of settings and/or characters in many of the stories. As these stories have appeared over the course of years, this must reflect Author Park's real interests. It does indeed show. A collection sure to please Park fans and anyone who likes a laugh with their "hmm" sci fi. I mean, who among us does not love "His thoughts were shrouded in rumor, perfumed with adventure and abstruse interlinear controversy" as a quotable quote? One knows one's own.

Comme d'habitude, these sixteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method of general remarks followed by brief responses to each one below.


A Note to My Translator is the funniest takedown of the Culture Industry℠'s bizarre effort to translate the work of an author into a local cultural property, thus causing huge misunderstanding and much ill-will:

Page eight, a little lower down: The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball.
Page nine: Solomon Eveready reappears, smoking cut-grade reefer and imitating a trout. Explain this to me. Explain also the presence of scuba gear that "reeks of melon."

Honestly, I've read translations that felt as though they must've been the subject of a correspondence much like this.

It was hilarious to me, and sets an irreverent, mischievous tone I batten on. 5*

Bring on the Dancing Horses's unnamed narrator hit me with "Penumbra College in Vermont" and made me cackle, then his girlfriend's name "Tabitha Grammaticus"...and that housecoat...! Seriously, I'm still trying to sketch it to understand the topology.

The story itself, well, what a sad little incel this guy is, if I didn't know better I'd say he was fever-dreaming it all. You know what...maybe he is. 3.5*

The Wife on Ambien sketches anomie in cold relief as "the wife on Ambien" does things our Prufrockian putz of a narrator would never dare to do, I half expected her to eat a peach for gods' sake. I wished the refrain wasn't quite so Lucy-Ellmanly.

The wife on Ambien recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot, sings the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we need to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn’t matter, that the sun will swallow the earth exactly eight billion years, or thirteen weeks, or twenty-four hours from now. The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four a.m. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, and promise each other their children in marriage. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you’re a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail.

3.5*
Machine City makes that film-student friend into a last gasp of the end-of-adolescence pretentiousness. Bethany Blanket...sounds like a manic pixie girl, right?...puts "Ed" in her student film requiring him to be honest and natural with the girl he just got broken up with by her also-Korean parents objecting to his ancestry. Now, of course, he's a lawyer with a fancy life thinking about les jadis. Not fascinating but oddly...compelling...familiar maybe. 4*

An Accurate Account proves that drama is easy, comedy is *hard*. A stand-up routine that, for me, was a real misfire...like a less-offensive Matt Rife set. 3*

The Air as Air is elegiac in tone, is the air's testator, is clearly about the processing of profound sadness, grief, loneliness: "The jukebox kicked in. Some song I used to hate, but at the moment it made me sad. It pinned me down."

It pinned down the entire mechanism of gaining, painfully and slowly, perspective. The narrator (PTSD and all) and his father, whom he calls "The Big Man" at the man's insistence:

"So you know about Uncle Buck," he said. "The movie?" "What movie? I’m talking about your Uncle Buck. He went on that show where they give you a makeover. It was Lindy’s idea, the whole stupid TV thing. She has connections. You know Buck. He dresses worse than I do. He dresses like he smeared rubber cement on his chest and rolled around in a pile of undershirts. So they show the episode and it went a little too well, if you get my gist."

Sad, funny, unfortunately very relatable...they're not communicating or connecting even a little bit. 4.5*

Seven Women has a therapist elucidating the long and grueling self-confrontation of therapy from her point of view, the way she thinks about the deep-dives into other people's emotions. "Sometimes people tell stories and they leave out the feelings—My job is to show them where the feelings are." 5* for that insight alone...Hannah the patient's a really crappy human being.

The Gift offers me a course I really want to take: "Advanced Aphorism" though not with Dublinski necessarily. The letter to the alumni magazine being written says it was never offered again. I demand a retake on all my school years so I can take this course! Fun wordplay, slight idea. 4*

Watch Your Step is a log-line for a technothriller that feels like it was being fleshed out; as the story progresses, I was trying to think of reasons Author Park left it here, when there's enough, to my story-ear, to support a novella. What gives? 3.5* because it's marooned without coming into port.

Two Laptops does nothing for me because the "man loses family through no fault of his own" trope bugs me. The wife and son he's misplaced live close but...never mind, no point really, as he is reduced to a skype face to the son, I realized he deserved it. 3* for choice of subject matter.

Weird Menace stresses the role memory can't help but play in our relationships to our past, to the people in our lives, and to this weird idea we think is a reality called the self. It's all dialogue, all the time, and all the more fun for that, since I like "Toner Low" as the director's name. DVD commentary was never like this when I was watching horror movies! 4*

Thought and Memory centers transness, but managed to make me wince by leaving in "transgendered" which ain't a good thing. I wish it had not been there like a turd in the punchbowl. Still, a decent and overall surprisingly good effort for someone not trans. 3.5*

Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts didn't really excite me much...Tabby doesn't inspire sympathy as she is presented here...and her career is very amusing indeed, but doesn't make up for the sour note of the narrator's overall dissatisfaction, his dislike and disdain for so many around him. "My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world," sums it up on the tone front; not my fave but very well-written, with some humor that broke through my dissatisfaction. 4*

Eat Pray Click might hit you differently than it did me...my boyfriend is in Chat psychosis so the way the machine comes alive, sort of, and what it does, just did not feel fictional, while feeling mentally disturbing. No rating.

Slide to Unlock might be the most unnerving story in here...almost horror...memory problems scare me leaky. It's a modern problem, trying to keep clear in one's mind the very complicated ways we're required to interface with a world gone digital...in fact, it's not much more complicated than the past, only the medium's changed from speaking to a fallible human to fallibly humanly speaking to a system made by fallible humans. I got the wry humor in here in my bones. 5*

An Oral History of Atlantis isn't so much a story as a proof of concept...every emotional register, every techno-detail, every beat in this collection gets its bones into this stew. What I couldn't find was a through-line to make me invest in it the way MtPR was meant to. 3.25*