This started out promising but as I slogged through it, it quickly became apparent that I was losing more and more interest in what I was reading. I am writing this directly after finishing and I can barely recall any of the characters that I just read about.

The writer is clearly very talented, but this book feels too showy, more of a "look how intelligent I am" swagger that makes the reader feel, in all honesty, a little dim-witted. Some of the concepts had promise, but execution was lacking, and too many of the stories just ended with no understanding of why they were ever written in the first place.

Several of the stories were interlinked, with character names mentioned in later stories that were from previous ones. The fleeting mention of them was so obscurely done that you really had to pay attention or you would miss it. As I was reading, when I came upon these character references I would forget which story they were from and who they even were.

The collection did have some promising themes and concepts - many of the stories were centered around writers and writing which kept me reading - but honestly? I really can't think of anything memorable that stood out here for me. Sadly disappointed.

DNF’d this one at 27%. I’m super bummed because I was really expecting to like this one more! I felt that the stories didn’t have much depth, and I was struggling to connect or care about any of the narratives. Unfortunately, I think this book just wasn’t it for me, but I’d still love to try some of Park’s longer-form writing at some point in the future.

Park spins loosely connected short stories in this collection. They range from absurd to laugh out loud funny to poignant.

The first story, "A Note To My Translator" sets the tone. The author of the novel "Mexican Fruitcake", "(as you insist on rendering the title)", conveys to the translator several notes, including: "Page seven: Who is Solomon Eveready? What is he doing in my book?" And we're off!

Spycraft, technology, young love, filmmaking, sci-fi, and wisdom dispensed in a fortune cookie. That description barely scratches the surface of the playfulness and heart behind these stories.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the Advance Reader Copy. (pub. date 7/29/2025)

Big thanks to Random House and NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of Ed Park’s incredible new short story collection An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories. I have heard of Ed Park, but haven’t read anything from him, although Same Bed Different Dreams is on my to-read list. I was surprised at how funny and absurd the stories in this collection are. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but I found the stories to all be strange and absurd and often presenting apt and humorous characterizations of elements of modern life, especially in areas of art, writing, and technology. Furthermore, these aren’t traditional, canonical type of short stories from the past, but rather I found them to be unique character studies where we find the characters engaged in a strange or complicated aspect of life. In addition, a few of the stories take narrative risks and present the story in unique formats, which I really enjoyed. Sometimes these approaches to stories can seem more like a novelty or decoration, but for Park’s stories and characters, they provide a unique framing device to capture the absurdity and humor in each event.
The collection starts off with “A Note to My Translator”, a brief letter from the fictional and pseudonymous author Hans de Krap, who appears in another story. The basic premise of this story is that the translator has rewritten the book’s first chapter with “brazen, unnoted blunders”, which de Krap categorizes in 3 hilarious pages. It’s unclear whether this was a willful change or something is completely lost in translation, but the book, titled Mexican Fruitcake in E’s translation (not de Krap’s original title) features many strange changes that seem to go beyond language choices. Another selection with a kind of experimental approach to the story is “The Wife on Ambien”, which lists all of the ways the narrator’s wife differs on Ambien compared to when she does not take Ambien, and how this sleeping medication makes her a more productive, but also risk-taking woman. I also enjoyed “Machine City”, where the narrator, Joon, details his college experience appearing in an experimental improvisatory student film with an ex-girlfriend. Joon, who is taking a class in surrealism, is eventually introduced to Bethany Blanket, who ends up directing him and his ex-girlfriend Yuna, in a film. It seemed like this story was almost like a key in understanding how the other stories fit together, since many of the stories take a surrealist approach, where artists often “mentally stitch bits together into one exquisite thing. The coherence of incoherence.” Despite his prior relationship with Yuna and the strange break-up and sending her a 20 page letter, Bethany requires that they act like they are meeting for the first time for her film. The story is framed by the Joon’s current recollections of this time, searching for information about the film and Bethany’s career on IMDB. I loved the Nirvana references in the story, especially when Joon shares plays “Lithium” on headphones for Massimo, one of his friends. The dialogue and situations in this story are really funny to consider, and it just reminded me of reminiscing about those kind of absurd experiences from college. The story “The Air as Air” also features one of the recurring elements found in other stories, the town of Eucalyptus, and has some of the funny dialogue where words and phrases have double meanings. In the story, the narrator, who studies breathing techniques from a guy named Karl Ababa, meets with his father, who makes the narrator call him The Big Man. When they meet, they catch up on what they are up to, and The Big Man says
“‘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.’”
I found this to be really funny, and the entire meeting with his father was pretty humorous. Throughout many of the stories, there are similar examples of this kind of word play and punning that add to both the uniqueness and absurdity of the stories. “Seven Women” was fascinating in that details 7 women who are all connected to Hannah Hahn, an editor who created an obscure literary magazine whose rejection letters were sent on postcards where she retitled their submissions and edited the piece down to one sentence. It reminded me of the translator from the first story. These characters are all connected not only through their relationships, but also their proximity to Hannah. One of my favorite stories was “The Gift”, where the narrators writing a letter to his alumni magazine, sharing the experience as students in an experimental class known as “Advanced Aphorism”, which was never taught again. This was another story with incredible word play, but it also functions as a satire of higher education, as the professor, Dublinski, has unusual methods and inconsistent meeting times and places for the class. “Two Laptops” was also a humorous critique of modern technology, where the narrator’s wife leaves him and moves in with another woman in the same condo complex. His son, who wants to go by C-Love, also features in the story, and they try to find interests for him, from music lessons, to sports, and eventually computers. In this story, C-Love communicates with his dad via skype when he stays at his mom’s place, even though it’s in the same neighborhood. However, sometimes the connection goes “metallic, bits of it gray and bits of it green, and big chunks of the image fall out, so it looks like I’m seeing his skull.” C-Love also has trouble seeing his father. In another great story “Eat Pray Click”, the narrator also has trouble connecting with an old friend who has developed a way to manipulate kindle books to create innumerable iterations of the novel. When the narrator tries to connect with Rolph later, he experiences a similar disconnection through technology, wondering if Rolph was even where he said he was. Both characters in this story studied with Stoops, a professor in “Machine City” who teaches the Surrealism course and who founded a literary movement called Sensibilism and its antithesis, Mood Writing. I loved the interconnection between stories here, as well as the satire of literary criticism and technology. One of the last stories, “Slide to Unlock”, is also a kind of satire of passwords, where it presents various iterations of password formation, but is also critical of the kind of personal information that these passwords rely on. It’s similar to “The Wife on Ambien” in that it is something like a list, but it’s also a great critique of something that has become a feature of our modern lives.
I loved these stories, both the individual stories and the entirety of the collection. It was great to see interconnections among stories where ideas, concepts, places, and people overlapped and came up in different places (Hans de Krap appears in another story as well). Furthermore, the stories are really entertaining and humorous, offering some bizarre and absurd situations. Many of the stories feature word plays or subtle satire that allows readers to question these aspects of life. I will revisit these stories, and I feel like many of them would be fun to teach, to see how students would respond to them. I’m also wondering if these stories appealed to me because I’m closer in age to Park, or whether a younger generation might get some of the humor and satire in these stories. Regardless, I’m sure that these stories will challenge their ideas and conceptions of short stories, possibly broadening their perspectives. Although these stories may not be for everyone, I thoroughly enjoyed them and recognize that they help to extend the boundaries on ideas about creative writing and short stories in particular. I highly recommend this collection.

Brief, well paced and off-beat but honest, Ed Park's An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories gathers 16 previously published and tangentially related short stories. Some are absurdist, some play with format, a few fall in to the more traditional fare of a sudden twist ending or nostalgic pining for a past time. It is both playful and adventurous, reading an author experimenting.

None of them are especially long, but all are different. It starts with a strong note with "A Note to My Translator" detailing the many are increasingly exasperating ways an author feels his book is being changed by the translator. "Weird Menace" is the transcript of a movie commentary where the two speaking get increasingly drunk and honest, trying to recall their past reasoning or decisions. While not all quite cohere, there are still amusing bits like the forgotten chapters of the Chicago manual of style in the title story. "Eat Pray Click" has the best premise about a rogue programmer who creates a Kindle that has a never the same twice text that pulls from all the uploaded literature, possibly sharing their own masterwork sentence by sentence.

What a cool, collection! I was only lightly familiar with Park's stories so this was mostly new to me. I can't wait to share it with Senior English teachers! There is so much wit, irony, humour, creativity, excellent voice...I know this will be well-received by staff and keen students.

Thank you NetGalley for this great ARC!

A singular reading experience, this collection of stories together feels like a fun, witty, fever dream. There's celebration of the mundane & surreal speculative fiction, all infused with humor and insight. I greatly enjoyed "An Accurate Account", "Watch Your Step", "Two Laptops", "Weird Menace", "Well Moistened With Cheap Wine...", and "Slide to Unlock".

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

The stories I enjoyed the most were ‘Wife on Ambien’, ‘Watch Your Step’., ‘Weird Menace’, and ‘Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine…’. Unfortunately, most of the rest didn’t hold my attention and I found myself wondering what their point was. Maybe I wish those had been pushed a little more to the side of surreal or absurd? There didn't seem to be an overall theme holding all of the stories together. I did like that some of the settings and characters appeared in the other stories. It was a quick, but not entirely memorable, read.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for providing me with the arc.

As with most collections of short stories, some are good and some are bad. This author has a way of drawing out the language for the purposes of his own intellectual entertainment, which makes some of these stories completely non-sensical. After reading 'The Gift', I thought, what was that about, and what was the point? Then there were some that were enjoyable, like 'Wife on Ambien', and 'Two Laptops'.

It's as if each were written by a different author. It's a short book, but dragged on due to many of the stories being confusing and tedious. Several characters are referenced in multiple stories, so that ties a few things together, but this was more of a presumptuous collection of musings by an author highlighting the mundanity of life. All in all, it could have been more entertaining, and less intellectually high brow.

I enjoyed some of the short stories in the collection more then others. Park does an incredible job in quickly creating a robust and full character which I really enjoyed. I wished there was more of a through line between the stories as they were all very separate. This was my first exposure to Park but I hope not my last.

3.5 stars but rounding down.

Thank you for the advanced reader copy Netgalley & Random House Publishing Group - Random House | Random House.

An Oral History of Atlantis is an amusing, vaguely experimental short story collection. Ed Park plays with form and content with some stories more firmly grounded in reality than others.

My favorites were "A Note to my Translator," "The Wife on Ambien," "Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine..." and "Slide to Unlock"." Each of these had a sharp style to them, whereas some of the others felt more like unfinished ideas. I liked the writing on a sentence-level, but found the collection as a whole a bit forgettable.

This collection will work well for people who appreciate a blend of the mundane with the surreal in their short stories.

an oral history of atlantis is ed park’s first publication following his pulitzer-finalist novel same bed, different dreams. i will admit that i haven’t read the novel itself, but i have to assume that it was much, much better than this short story collection. or i just have wildly different tastes from everyone in the pulitzer committee.

in the 16 short stories presented in the slim, 200-page volume, ed park showcases an impressive dedication to what is best described as “self-pitying straight man” fiction. i get the sense that he had things that he wanted to say about contemporary relationships and loneliness, but it was all filtered through such a narrow and intensely misogynistic lens that i had more or less given up on “getting it” after the first handful of stories.

there are two kinds of stories in an oral history of atlantis: stories about straight men who dislike the women in their lives, and stories about lesbians who dislike the women and also the men in their lives. and you might, initially, feel tempted to appreciate that a straight male author took the time to write such a high proportion of his stories about queer women, but no! if you systematically went through the book and changed all of the lesbian narrators into straight men, nothing else about those stories would need to be altered. every wife, girlfriend, coworker, or female acquaintance in the book is either incredibly shallow or so odd and unknowable that it blows the original manic-pixie-dreamgirl archetype out of the water. it’s like reading all of the most misogynistic bits of murakami, but without the parts of murakami’s writing that are actually kind of good.

but women aren’t the only people to receive pretty shitty treatment throughout! fear not, park also uses the m-slur no less than 3 times (possibly more?) to describe the narrator of the last story, who tops out at an impressive 4’11’’.

in truth, i might have liked this 10 or so years ago, back when i still kind of believed that award-winning fiction written by and for men was somehow peak literature. but i just can’t bring myself to care about stories that all center on men who are unhappy with their partners or their parents or their lives, especially when the writing itself is lackluster, the messaging shallow and heavy-handed, and the endings completely and utterly underwhelming.

i am, however, clearly in the minority on pretty much all of my opinions here! at the time that i write this review, only 3 of the other 102 ratings gave this book anything less than 3 stars. i stand pretty firmly by all of the reasons that i have for disliking this particular collection, but if those same things don’t bother you then, who knows, it might be worth a shot.

thank you to netgalley and random house publishing for an e-ARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

This is a cheery collection of 16 stories, 12 of which have been previously published, that introduces a Park who feels very different from his long form fiction. The stories are both satiric and witty but they are also gentle. Know that some of them feel unfinished but that the language more than makes up for that. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A treat for short story fans who know to read one story a day.

I was really excited to read a collection of short stories since I haven’t read one in quite a while! I LOVE short stories.

What I like about short stories is that we get a glimpse of a life or plot and usually a little lesson or at least a reason for the story.

This collection had a few that were hits and a few that were misses for me. My two favorites were “The Wife on Ambien” and “The Gift,” and for very different reasons. Some of the stories were good, but not great, and the others just seemed to be rambling and endless.

The author is humorous and witty, but sometimes the writing seems convoluted and/or pointless. 😬

I enjoyed some of these, but not all of them, which is to be expected!

Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis is a knowingly absurd, often poignant, and intermittently dazzling short story collection that delights in structural play, mild disorientation, and the small, peculiar humiliations of modern life. It functions less as a cohesive whole and more as a series of recursive glitches in the human operating system, stitched together by refrains, callbacks, and a bemused kind of metaphysical fatigue.

Across sixteen stories, Park moves between formats—commentary tracks, transcripts, password prompts, faux memoirs—all executed with considerable style. While the voice leans ironic, there are flashes of sincerity that pierce the surface. A man sifts through his past via a string of failed login attempts. A translator’s liberties become a kind of metafictional turf war. A wife on Ambien ambles into existential crisis. These pieces work not because they are tidy but because they embrace their own thematic entropy.

Standouts include “Slide to Unlock,” which offers a surprisingly tender meditation on memory, identity, and technological decay. “Machine City” and “Weird Menace” manage a rare alchemy of satire and pathos. Repeating names, refracted motifs, and slight distortions across stories lend the collection a strange internal logic, even when individual pieces vary in execution.

That variation, however, is part of the experience. Some stories feel like sketches or intellectual amusements, clever in premise but emotionally weightless. At times, the collection seems to value wit over resonance, and while that’s a deliberate choice, it may leave some readers adrift. The book never quite insists on being understood, which is both a virtue and a limitation.

Still, Park is an immensely capable writer. His prose is polished, precise, and occasionally dazzling in its economy. If you appreciate short fiction that privileges ideas over arcs, that courts confusion without apology, this is likely to satisfy.

Final verdict: Strange, smart, and structurally inventive. Not all stories linger, but those that do feel like fragments from a parallel life—half-remembered, oddly familiar, and occasionally profound.

Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis is a clever, offbeat collection that showcases his flair for experimental storytelling and sharp wit. Each piece feels like its own little universe, with some overlapping details, ranging from mock transcripts and oddball interviews to password prompts turned existential therapy sessions. The formats are inventive, and the voice is undeniably unique.

That said, the book sometimes feels more like a showcase of stylistic gymnastics than a cohesive reading experience. A few stories are absolute gems. Some were funny, strange, and surprisingly moving. Others feel more like conceptual sketches than fully realized tales. The title story in particular, while ambitious, didn’t leave much of an emotional imprint.

When the stories click, they really shine. “Machine City” and “Weird Menace” struck a nice balance between absurdism and humanity. But several entries felt like they were trying too hard to be clever, and at times I found myself lost-not in the immersive sense, but more in the “wait, what just happened?” kind of way.

Highs: Creative formats, dry humor, original voice.
Lows: Inconsistency, occasional emotional distance, and a few stories that read more like exercises than narratives.

Final Thoughts:
This is a bold, brainy collection that rewards patience and a taste for the unconventional. While not every story landed for me, I admire Park’s willingness to take risks. If you’re a fan of experimental fiction that doesn’t take itself too seriously, this one’s worth dipping into—just expect a few head-scratchers along the way.

A strange and beautiful collection of stories. I especially loved "My Wife on Ambien", "Well-Moistened With Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts", "Eat Pray Click", and "Slide to Unlock".

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read a copy.

I didn't really have many expectations going into this collection, but it didn't strike me in a way other short story collections have been as of late. There are quite a few stories in this one, but I thought some were a little too short and it was jarring in how we kept switching around from setting to setting, character to character. I can see how others might really love this short story collection, although it wasn't my personal cup of tea--so it give it a chance if it interests you.

An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park is a collection of short stories, and as is often the case it is a pretty mixed bag, there were a couple of stories I really liked, most notably Slide to Unlock and The Wife on Ambien and several that I did not like at all, with the majority falling somewhere in between. One thing that felt consistent throughout the collection was a sense of the familiar but with a twist, a world that at first felt like our own but somehow was subtly different and strange. Overall I think that if this book is an introduction to the writing of Ed Park it will certainly give the reader a good idea of whether or not it is for them and I think unfortunately it is not for me.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

An Oral History of Atlantis is the best collection of stories I've read in a long time. Ed Park spewed 16 surreal stories that ranged everywhere from hilarious to poignant by twisting themes of art, expression, self-discovery, the digital age, and human connection. Stories start off relatively straight forward (for the most part), but then they began to bend and twist into something unexpected in the most welcome way.

I enjoyed the unfurling the most, so I'm not inclined to share too much about any individual stories, but "A Note to my Translator" made me laugh right out of the gate. I was instantly excited to keep reading. "Thought and Memory" was readable and clever before turning very sincere, in a way that I already know will stay with me. "The Wife on Ambien" and "Well-moistened With Cheap Wine, The Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of their Absent Sweethearts" were other standouts for me.