On an Oral History of Atlantis

I find this harder to review than most short-story collections. Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis is interesting in the way it moves past the classic short story — these aren’t simple narratives, and many of the pieces are plainly indebted to Dada, Surrealism, and other avant-garde forms.

The opening story, “A Note to My Translator,” had me cackling quietly to myself like a loon. I came to it with little expectation, never having read Park, and I assumed I was getting a conventional preface. That is not what I got, and his sense of humor is phenomenal. The attentive reader notices names and references recurring across the stories — Hans de Krap, the supposed faux-author of that first note, among them. “Machine City” plays with avant-garde cinema, nested oddly inside a literary narrative, where actors — real people “acting” behind their everyday masks — play characters in a film being spontaneously recorded; the plot faintly echoes Synecdoche, New York, and the title seems to point at The Matrix. “Two Laptops” depicts the aftermath of a marriage, an aftermath that echoes into the experimental piece that follows it, “Weird Menace.” “Slide to Unlock” builds its narrative out of a protagonist’s choice of computer passwords.

It’s a genuinely odd collection, and it somehow works. Park has a powerful way with prose, and the stories, for the most part, land — they are extraordinarily creative. One risk of boundary-pushing literature is that it functions only as a curiosity: interesting because it plays with form, stylistically novel, but without much substance underneath. That isn’t the case here. Park has made substantive, thematically rich pieces that work as stories while doing new things with the written word, which is a real achievement.

This isn’t one of my favorites of the year, but I respect it immensely. I suspect some readers won’t take to it and others will be enamored. If you want more traditional storytelling, spend your time elsewhere; if you want to explore something new, this is the place. I expect it’ll be a critics’ favorite for 2025, and it’s easy to see why.