Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing this eARC.

An Oral History of Atlantis is a short story collection which deal with the mundanities of the human experience in unique and occasionally absurd ways.

This collection is Ed Park at his best, and his best is unique, fresh, sharp and concise. I loved Same Bed, Different Dreams primarily for its weirdness and whimsy, and in An Oral History of Atlantis, Park delivers the same meal this time as a selection of appetizers. Almost all of these stories ended before I was done with them, and certainly all left me hungry for more. Though the stories may look like a bundle of disparate parts, somehow Park makes them all dance the same dance, and in some ways connects them in their own almost-universe. I laughed, I had a couple minor existential crises, and I'll certainly be picking up anything else Ed Park writes for the foreseeable future.

Not my typical read, so it was nice trying a new genre. "The Wife on Ambien," was probably my favorite and the most memorable in my opinion. As with most collections of works, some will stand out and some just wont click with the reader. I found this to be the case, but it was overall enjoyable!

The Oral History of Atlantis is not my usual read. Some of the stories were interesting reads, but most I could not get behind as recommending to others. I did have one that I enjoyed, Slide to Unlock it hit how we come to our internet passwords right on the head. The writing was interesting and had a lot of dialogue that was greatly developed. However, this one just wasn't for me.

Thank you to Random House for the advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

I'm really not a short stories person, but this was laugh-out-loud funny. Park is such an imaginative writer who creates worlds that are intimate and immediately knowable.

This is a surprising, entertaining, playful collection of stories--I never knew where they would end up or what form they would take (there's a letter to an outrageous translator, a commentary track for a film, and some structures that are harder to explain). They're not afraid to be silly or serious, and there's often a speculative fiction flavor even in the seemingly most realistic settings. I really enjoyed them, and was always interested to see what would come next.

Thanks to the author, the publisher, and Netgalley for my free earc in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are all my own.

This was my first experience reading a work by Ed Park, and let me tell you: I was blown away. I know it's going to be a good read when I'm instantly sucked into the book and I'm reading at a very rapid pace. This was it. I'm a big fan of short stories, and this collection didn't disapppoint in any way. I'll be reading Ed Park's other works and I'm super excited about that! I can't wait for Ed Park's next book.

Brilliant, sometimes elliptical stories, that peek out of their high concept shrouds in humanistic, humane bursts of life. Ed Park is funny. These stories are funny. They’re also deeply intelligent. This is a book to give your favorite uncle, or nephew. Some stories are worse than others but all are great.

i love the description of this book and the title and the cover — maybe too much! i had high expectations, but this story collection felt kind of one-note. the absurdity couldn't sustain itself and i found myself tiring of the voice and wishing for a change.

This collection was weird and lyrical, but only a few of the stories stood out to me among the more mid ones.
I liked The Wife on Ambien, The Gift, and Eat Pray Click.
I do think it was worth picking up if you like short stories. Just the majority didn't click with me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a copy. This is out now!

Thank you to Net Galley for this ARC. short stories are a struggle for me. Either I love them and they feel way too short, they end too soon with no apparent resolution or I just feel like I’ve completely missed the point 🤷‍♀️. This was no different, some stories really resonated with me, some felt unresolved and some I just didn’t understand at all. It’s always interesting to give a try to something different, so it was worth the read.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the ARC!

Admittedly, this one was not a favorite of mine. I find short stories hard to get through, as they don't ever really seem to have resolve. I also just found the collection kind of silly? I'm no intellectual, so it didn't seem super accessible to me.

Thank you again for the ARC!

“For it was on that night, with the stars looking polished in the December sky, that Dublinski said, for the first time in recorded history, ‘It is— what it is.’” 🌌💭

a special thank you to Net Galley and Random House for allowing me access to an Advanced Reader’s Copy of An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park!! it’s an absolute privilege to receive an ARC & i’m so honored to be able to share a honest review in exchange.

🔖 publication date: july 29th, 2025
review: ★ ★ ★.5 (07/24/25)

this is a collection of stories on the mundane (or mundane adjacent??) lives of some unique characters. it reads straightforward yet comedic & stuffed with wandering thoughts!

as a someone who loves sentences with interruptions, i enjoyed the writing style!! additionally, the variation in format from prose to letters and transcripts made the read more fun!

my favorite stories would have to be “the gift” & “eat pray click”, get me a copy of The Dizzies ASAP!!

honestly, it feels as though i read a lot but also nothing. for a book with only 136 page, it felt much longer but not necessarily in a dragging my way along sense. it’s great for a reader who wants a book where each chapter feels a slice-of-a-life movie!

I was an outlier on Same Bed different dreams, and LA Times award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist. I found it confusing as it was an alternate Korean history book and as I knew Korean history I couldn't tell fact from fiction. I have a Korean daughter so I am very interested in all things Korean.
This new book is more to my liking, though at times equally confusing. It is sort of inter connected short stories and vignettes.
I laughed out loud at some of the absurd stories. Many of the stories have unreliable narrators. From Korean American students at Yale, to others in New York and California, many of the stories border on the absurd.
A father and son in meet in a California town. They go to dinner at Barbara's steakhouse where there are pictures of an actress. That actress turns up later talking with the director of one of her movies. That movie is based on a story about the author of the book the movie is based on. Characters come and go. The style of these stories is quite original and I really enjoyed them.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the EARC. I am glad I had a new chance to appreciate Park's writing. The opinions are my own.

Happy pub day, Park.

I enjoy Park’s handling of speculative fiction in this set of short stories. He subtly displays his digestion and dexterous utilization of simple themes or ideas, presenting some them in a refreshing way. For example, he reimagines the Kindle’s function in “Eat Pray Click”: the AI software assembles well-known literary works, including pieces of Rolph’s (a character in the story) fiction writing, based on the reader’s preferences and habits, thereby creating a consequential living organism.

Park routinely dusts his stories with clever humor (and satire at times) without over-drenching them to a cheapening effect. I wouldn’t mind if he layered on the speculative—in the critiques or plots as such—more heavily, which I did not think in his novel, Same Bed Different Dreams (I could not keep up in Park’s Pulitzer finalist). Here, I appreciate the author’s use of various forms, such as the recording of a movie’s commentary track in “Weird Menace.”

The inclusions in the second half are stronger; the first half took me a minute to get through. My three favorites out of sixteen short stories (and some of them quite short at that) are “Watch Your Step,” “Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine,” and “Slide to Unlock.” “Slide to Unlock” may be put forth as an example of why short stories deserve our attention. If Park wants to develop “Watch Your Step” into a longer spy thriller (or give us another, more approachable spy thriller), I’m down. An honorable mention should go to “A Note to My Translator”—a solid opener. The collection’s namesake (?) went over my head, but it’s smart of Park to show us his capable maneuvering through distinct tones.

My thanks to Random House and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on July 29, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7585938091).

This was such an interesting collection of stories. I don't often read books like this so it was outside of my comfort zone. I liked the length of the stories, which kept me engaged throughout the book, even if the story itself wasn't my favorite. I was fascinated by how the author was able to connect so many of the stories together and I was thrilled when I was able to spot connections between characters in the stories. Overall I enjoyed the collection and had fun reading it.

In this quirky collection of sixteen stories, Park, the Pulitzer Prize finalist for his literary hit “Same Bed Different Dreams” charms with an original collection of tales. Some of the stories are straightforward. In “A Note to My Translator” an author, Hans de Krap, disgruntled by the translation of his novel “Mexican Fruitcake,” writes a censorious letter to the translator. Others are relatable, like the tale of the titular wife on Ambien who “hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies” or “Slide to Unlock”which satirizes password prompts and the passwords that we can no longer recall, even when we are being held up at gunpoint at an ATM. Still others are humorous, like the alumni notes for community college students who took a class with Dublinski, the hottest professor three years running, who did not merit the prime real estate on campus, was eventually placed on administrative leave and then died in a suspicious skiing accident, but coined the phrase, “It is — what it is.” Some of the characters in these tales show up in other stories: Miriam, who narrates both “Seven Women” (seven loosely related portraits) and the spy story “Watch Your Step,” also figures in a third (“Thought and Memory”), and Hannah Hahn, the legendary editor who is the connecting link in “Seven Women,” shows up in the standout “Weird Menace,” a transcript of a conversation between an actress and her director as they re-watch their low-budget sci-fi B movie turned cult classic decades later.

Park has crafted an inventive and playful collection that allows his fans to stroll through his mind. Thank you Will Lyman, Marketing at Random House | Hogarth | Dial and Net Galley for an advance copy of this collection of whimsical stories.

Park's conceptual cleverness can't overcome a fundamental disconnect between ambition and execution. The premises are intriguing—identity blurring through movie roles, life reflected in forgotten passwords, aging actors dissecting B-movies—but the stories never develop beyond their initial conceits.
The prose feels overly precious, straining for profundity in mundane moments that don't support the weight. Park's "trademark wit" mentioned in blurbs reads more like forced quirk than genuine insight. Stories like "Slide to Unlock" rely too heavily on their gimmick (life via passwords) without building toward meaningful revelation.
While I appreciate Park's attempt to capture how technology mediates modern experience, the execution feels bloodless. Characters exist primarily as vehicles for ideas rather than fully realized people wrestling with recognizable problems. The collection reads more like creative writing exercises than lived stories.
Perhaps devotees of experimental literary fiction will find more here, but despite the strong critical reception, these stories never grabbed me. Sometimes innovative concepts need stronger emotional grounding to work. I kept setting it aside for books with more human urgency.

Moving, surprising, and delightfully offbeat, this is a standout collection for short fiction lovers.

An Oral History of Atlantis is a touching and imaginative collection of 16 short stories by Ed Park. Some will make you laugh out loud, others will catch you off guard with unexpected emotional depth, but all of them showcase Park’s talent for turning everyday observations into something memorable.

To truly enjoy this book, you have to appreciate the art of the short story. Each piece stands on its own, and while there are subtle thematic links, the joy here is in the variety of stories that shift from satire to sincerity, from experimental formats to quiet moments of human connection.

While not every story will hit the same note for every reader, the collection as a whole is clever, thought-provoking, and deeply enjoyable.

Recommended for fans of short fiction, experimental formats, and stories that aren’t afraid to be a little weird, and a lot sincere.

This one was so hard to read through. I wanted to like it, but I kept getting lost about who he was talking about or talking to. It was just not flowing for me.

I wanted to thank NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this advanced reader copy and this is my honest review.

I was incredibly intrigued by this - but unfortunately it just wasn't for me. I really struggled to get through it, and I just think it is not my type of writing.