Tag: Author

Interview: Ed Park, author of An Oral History of Atlantis

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The Speculative Shelf is very excited to welcome Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park to the blog to discuss his wonderful new collection, An Oral History of Atlantis (out now from Penguin Random House).

You can find our full review of the book here.

Publisher’s summary: In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters bemoan their fleeting youth, focus on their breathing, meet cute, break up, write book reviews, translate ancient glyphs, bid on stuff online, whale watch, and once in a while find solace in the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. Spanning a quarter century, these sixteen stories tell the absurd truth about our lives. They capture the moment when the present becomes the past—and are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most imaginative and insightful writers working today.

Q&A with author Ed Park:

Your work often plays with form, language, and meta-fiction. How do those experiments show up in this collection?

EP: I enjoyed finding different ways to transmit the various voices here. Three of the stories are letters (“A Note to My Translator,” “An Accurate Account,” and “The Gift”)—I love the epistolary form because the text has a “reason” to exist (i.e., someone is writing to someone else). The form envisions an audience. The most unusual structure can be found in “Weird Menace,” which is presented as a Blu-Ray commentary track on a science-fiction movie from the ’80s. I don’t know that they’re still doing commentary tracks, now that everything’s on streaming, but I used to find them pretty interesting—a whole new layer to the viewing experience.

There are some subtle interconnections from story to story: Were you purposely repeating characters and themes, or did those similarities unfold more organically?

EP: These stories were written across 25-plus years, sometimes with lengthy intervals between them, so I wasn’t always conscious of the connections. But I knew that certain names recurred, and I’d sometimes have a sense that one story (say, “Two Laptops”) might have some interesting connection with another (“The Air as Air”). Later, as I finalized the table of contents, I made a two-page chart so that I could see how these characters interacted with each other in various stories (and in fact “off the page”). I had to create rough biographies to make sure their chronologies intersected in a way that made sense—stuff that the reader doesn’t need to think about, but background that’s there in case he or she wants to probe deeper into the connections. 

I also like how the “blank space” between the stories can act like the passage of time. Hannah Hahn pops up in at least three places, in somewhat different. And Mercy Pang, the enigmatic artist in my novel Same Bed Different Dreams, actually made her first appearance in the story “Thought and Memory.” And you can trace another character from that story, Mimi, to at least two others in the book. 

When compiling a short story collection – how much thought goes into the order of the stories? Is it like sequencing an album tracklist or setting a baseball batting order – do you try to frontload your best ones? Or end with a bang?

EP: Quite a lot of thought! In a fun way.! I wanted to kick things off with “A Note to My Translator,” because it was my first published story (1998), and one that signals to the reader there’s plenty of humor ahead. In other words: This book will be fun. And I liked the idea of the title track coming at the end. The reader will have been thinking of the title through the course of the whole book, and now the “answer” will be revealed. (I also added a nod from this story back to “Note,” creating a loop of sorts.) 

Speaking of books being like albums, two—actually three—of the titles in AOHOA are taken from songs: “Bring on the Dancing Horses” (Echo and the Bunnymen), “Watch Your Step” (Elvis Costello), and “The Gift” (The Velvet Underground).  

The more explicitly speculative stories (“Eat Pray Click,” “Well-Moistened…,” the title story) are in the latter half of the book—I imagine that readers, having made it this far, are perhaps ready to go on a wilder ride. “Weird Menace”—the longest story here by far—is also something that wouldn’t necessarily work right out of the gate. 

On the other hand, I could imagine the reader dipping in at random—as one would listen to a CD on shuffle—and having a totally great experience. What if you read it backward?

There were 15 years between your debut novel Personal Days and your follow-up Same Bed Different Dreams in 2024, but it’s now been a quick turnaround to this collection? When might we see your next work? I’ve seen passing mentions of Three Tenses – a memoir “with fragments, observations, and anecdotes that form a picture of creativity in action.”  Is there anything else you can share about that?

EP: Yes, Three Tenses will be out next year, which I’m thrilled about. It’s a memoir that I wrote in 1998—fairly rapidly, with an intense sense of aesthetic purpose; then I put it in a drawer. The whole thing is rather lyrical and experimental, done in fragments, each one beginning with the same word. It’s a little like David Markson, a little like Oulipo. There are also strands that are pure fiction, woven in. I rediscovered the book in 2020, literally finding it in a box. I retyped the whole thing—a really unique experience. I write quite differently now, but there’s something about that early style that I find very attractive.

I’ve got another novel in progress. I don’t know when it will be done! But it’s been a lot of fun, and there’s some Buffalo/Korea content.

We’re both native Buffalonians and long-suffering fans of the Buffalo Sabres. The Sabres are in the midst of a historically rough stretch, missing the playoffs for 14 straight seasons and displaying a level of ineptitude the likes of which have rarely been seen in professional sports. That said…what gives you hope for the future? Will they (and can they) turn things around in our lifetimes?

EP: There’s always hope, as long as the team doesn’t go to another city. (The other day I was thinking of an alternate universe in which the Buffalo Braves had stayed in town; now they’re the Clippers.) Having said that, I’m distressed that they don’t know what to do with good players. Seeing so many ex-Sabres in the recent Stanley Cup finals was painful. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to offer such great insight into your work, Ed. I loved An Oral History of Atlantis and best of luck with its release!

Interview: Kirsten Bakis, author of King Nyx

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The Speculative Shelf is very excited to welcome Kirsten Bakis to the blog to discuss her brilliant new novel, King Nyx (out now from Liveright Books/Norton).

You can find our review of the book here.

Publisher’s summary:
Anna Fort wants to be a supportive wife, even if that means accompanying her husband for the winter of 1918 to a remote, frozen island estate so he can finish his book as the guest of an eccentric millionaire. When she learns three girls are missing from a school run by their host, Anna realizes finding them is up to her—even if that means risking her husband’s career, and possibly her life.

Q&A with author Kirsten Bakis:

Did you have prior knowledge of the Forts before writing the book? What drew you to them, and Anna Fort, in particular?

KB: I learned about Charles Fort years ago, and he stayed in my mind because he’s such an interesting character. For years, he spent his days in public libraries combing through books and scientific and meteorological journals in search of anomalous events, carefully copying out quotes and citations by hand, and bringing them home to file in a special cataloging system in shoeboxes. He wrote long rambling books putting forth a variety of strange and mismatched theories about why these things happened. For example, he suggested that red rain, or blood rain—which has been recorded in various times and places throughout history—might be caused by gigantic creatures in outer space fighting and bleeding. Sometimes he claimed he wasn’t serious, but his distrust of the scientific establishment and desire to poke holes in its logic (which he didn’t do a very good job of) did seem serious.

So, initially, I thought I would like to write a book about him. But the more I learned about his wife, Anna, the more I began to think that the really interesting story was hers. 

A lot of people thought Charles was a crank, but a few—notably the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser—thought he was a genius. As a result, Charles wound up publishing several books and making a name for himself. Today, we have hundreds of pages of his rambling thoughts, and hundreds more of notes by Theodore Dreiser for a never-published biography of Charles. But much less is known about Anna, the woman who made his writing career possible by working backbreaking domestic labor jobs and basically taking care of him in every way—and yet who was pretty silent on the topic of what she thought of his books. 

Dreiser, in his notes about a dinner he had with the Forts, dismissed her as being unable to understand her brilliant husband, and characterized her as a woman who “cannot think.”

She had once wanted to be a singer, but gave that up to take a backseat to her husband’s career. I do think the two of them genuinely loved each other, that she wanted him to succeed and that he appreciated her. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what that must have been like for her, and what might have played into her decision to prioritize him and his strange, nonsensical writings, which she herself didn’t seem to buy into. What made her choose to put her own desires on hold so that he could succeed? It’s such a familiar story, such a familiar dynamic. I wanted to examine it. 

Since not much is known about Anna Filing Fort, I made up a gothic, extravagant, sort of over-the-top adventure for her—something I wish she could have had, something I wanted to give her retroactively. 

The dialogue and language choices really do a great job capturing the distinct tone and feel of the time period. How did you channel that voice?

KB: Thank you. I’m not sure how it works, exactly, but I know I spent a lot of time researching the era, and reading the works of Charles Fort and others who wrote in the early 20th century. Not so much (for this purpose) the great writers with their own precise and distinct voices, like Virginia Woolf, but more ordinary things—chatty magazine articles, interviews, and that kind of thing. But I think most of it really happens when you’re sitting down and writing and just trying to—as you said—channel something. I do think that in some way, that’s what’s happening—you’re opening yourself up to voices that aren’t exactly yours, personalities that are different from your own. I have no idea how that works. It’s something so many writers talk about. I think there may be an element of actual magic.

Was it an intentional choice to tease a big spooky mansion and then put the characters on the outside looking in for most of the book?

KB: That’s a good question! I definitely think of gothic fiction as generally taking place partly inside a big spooky mansion, and King Nyx doesn’t, for most of the book. I want to say that it was a completely intentional and logical choice, but in truth, so much of writing happens by instinct. At some point I realized that they just weren’t going to get into the house until the end. So I decided to work with that. 

I do think that it’s a story about people who don’t get to inhabit the mansion—not really. Even if some of them do live in fine houses, they’re servants, or they’re, in some way, not in the center of power, and that fact shapes their lives. They orbit men who are the center, the sun, of their own little universes, and everyone else is just moving carefully around them. That’s part of what I see the story as being about.

What’s a piece of popular media (movie/TV show/book) you could fill in this blank with – “if you like _______ , you’ll like King Nyx.”

KB: This is a hard question! It’s so hard for me to see King Nyx from the outside. Maybe to put it in more general terms: if you like gothic fiction, if you like mystery, if you like feminism, if you like stories about eccentric millionaires, and creepy dolls, and suspense, and . . . talking birds??? — then you’ll like King Nyx.

I read that you haven’t reread your breakout debut, Lives of the Monster Dogs, in the 27 years since it’s been published. Do you think you’ll keep the same distance between yourself and King Nyx now that it’s out in the world?

KB: I think I might! It can be fun to try to translate a book into a really different form, like a screenplay, for example—where you really have to make changes to make it work. So that could be a reason to revisit something. But the idea of just re-reading it again as a novel doesn’t seem interesting to me. I’ve been over every inch of it, every word and comma, so many times, and that was fun, but I feel like it’s time to go onto other things.

What’s the last great book you read?

KB: I’ve been really enjoying Tana French’s novels lately. I especially love her first, In the Woods, which I read a few months ago, and also The Secret Place. She’s so good with suspense, and just a great, accomplished craftsperson—I’ve been taking a lot of notes as I read about what she’s doing and how she’s doing it. I’ve also recently discovered Seishi Yokomizo, a Japanese mystery novelist who published a lot in the mid-20th century. Pushkin Press, in the UK, is publishing English translations of some of them now. I loved The Village of Eight Graves and Death on Gokuman Island. They’re mysteries, but they also have a kind of folk-horror feel to them, which is true of a lot of Tana French’s work as well. A mix of folk horror and mystery is something I just love as a reader. I’m currently reading Victor LaValle’s Lone Women, which is historical horror, and it’s looking like it’s going to be fantastic.

Thank you so much for taking the time to offer such incredible insight into your work. I loved reading King Nyx and I think others will too!