AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS

A clutch of stories from Pulitzer finalist Park (Same Bed Different Dreams, 2023, etc.), heavy on the literary gamesmanship.

Park’s first collection recalls the offbeat works of 1960s postmodern stylists like Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, though in Park’s case the subject matter is more contemporary. “The Wife on Ambien” exploits the sleep drug’s reputation for inducing odd thoughts and behavior. (“The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks.”) In “Eat Pray Click,” a hacker devises a Kindle that can shuffle the texts of multiple books into one e-book, making for a weird but potentially profound reading experience. “Slide To Unlock” satirizes password prompts (“First time you had sex and did it count. Day, month, year. The full year or just the last two digits?”), and “Weird Menace” sends up the meandering chatter of the DVD bonus commentary. But Park isn’t just playing with unusual premises for their own sake—he’s looking for the ways that human idiosyncrasies manage to poke up to the surface even while technology tries to keep us tidy and algorithm friendly. (The actress in “Weird Menace” gets increasingly boozy and dismissive of the producer’s stay-on-topic prompts.) There’s more conventional short-story fare, at least by Park’s standards: “Machine City” concerns a guerrilla film production in a dingy college library space, “Watch Your Step” is an espionage yarn, and “Thought and Memory” concerns a successful writer ironically struggling to communicate. Not every story lands—the title story and “An Accurate Account” are woolly pomo sketches—but in most cases Park writes with an open-mindedness that suggests our every device can be mined for intelligent fiction.

A collection that revels in its quirks, smart and sensitive in equal measure.