Three Tenses
A Transmission from the Nineties
-
- Pre-Order
-
- Expected 11 Aug 2026
-
- 42,99 zł
-
- Pre-Order
-
- 42,99 zł
Publisher Description
An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stray musings and recollections reveal a writer's restless mind in this scintillating memoir from novelist Park (An Oral History of Atlantis). The volume comprises 1,500 brief missives originally written in 1998 and gleaned from Park's childhood as the son of Korean immigrants in Buffalo, his stint at Yale, his sojourns in South Korea and Europe, and his struggle to make it as a journalist and copy editor in Manhattan ("For a time I lived under the delusion that women find it charming when you correct their grammar"). The entries have no chronological order, but sometimes clump together for a page or two around offbeat themes. These include Korean spies, crackpot books that claim Buddhist monks from Afghanistan discovered America in the fifth century, and memorable New York City scenes ("In the subway car I do not sit.... A lady with black teeth wishes people a horrible weekend"). Writers are often better at thinking thoughts than doing deeds, and Park wisely downplays narrative arc in favor of stray ruminations and insights that 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.
