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A Transmission from the Nineties
by Ed Park
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.
What would your Desert Island Reads be, and why? (In the context of the novel, this is a book that has meant something special to you at a particular time in your life.)
This isn't a Desert Island Read, but when things are tense, I will read a Louise Penney book. They engage my mind, but are not heavy reading. I limit myself to two or three a year. This is similar to Crush reading The Collected Dorothy Parker book when she was stressed. I think I only have four l...
-Patricia_Williams
"Stray musings and recollections reveal a writer's restless mind in this scintillating memoir... . Ruminations and insights ... 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." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
This information about Three Tenses was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and An Oral History of Atlantis, his debut story collection. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. Born in Buffalo, Park lives in Manhattan with his family. He currently teaches writing at Princeton University.
If you liked Three Tenses, try these:
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do ...
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