"Living & Writing New York" — a reading at Fordham this Tuesday 2/8

I'll be reading and participating in a panel on February 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Fordham (the Lincoln Center campus, in Manhattan). The topic is "Living & Writing New York." I'm not sure what I'll read!

The other writers are Arthur Phillips, Mary Elizabeth Williams, and Jim Dwyer.

Rather complex directions here. It's in the 12th floor lounge at 113 W. 60th St.

Tonight! (Saturday 2/20)

Tonight at 8! Reading with Lynne Tillman, plus film & music, for "Impossible Geometries"—at 177 Livingston in the heart of Brooklyn.

More info here...and here...

Bashfully

Time Out on this Saturday's (2/20) event in Brooklyn:

The multidisciplinary benefit party Impossible Geometries, for the online journal Triple Canopy and the art-film space Light Industries, kicks off with readings by Ed Park and Lynne Tillman, follows with films and music, and promises to be the literary bash of the week.

November appearances!

I. Thurs., November 12, 7:30 p.m. (TIME CORRECTED!): Reading with Sung J. Woo for Dirty Laundry, at the Avenue A Laundromat (97 Avenue A).

II. Sat., November 14, 2 p.m.: Panel ("Everyone's a Critic!") with fellow critics Hua Hsu and Dennis Lim, for Page Turner: The Asian American Literary Festival. Ground floor, PowerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., DUMBO, Brklyn.

Reading this Thursday, October 8 at KGB

I'll be reading with two of my favorites, Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances), this Thursday at KGB, which is on 85 East 4th St. Doors open at 7.

It's a benefit for "Behind the Book," which promotes reading for schoolchildren and adults.

See you there?!

Weds. 9/30 at Columbia....

Getting Personal with Ed Park
Wednesday, September 30, 8PM
203 Mathematics Hall

Columbia Professor and acclaimed novelist and critic Ed Park will give a reading from his novel Personal Days, followed by an open Q&A. Personal Days, one of Time’s top ten fiction books of 2008, was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award and the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Park is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement and a contributor to the New York Times and LA Times, among many other publications. The Columbia Review and 114 Rue de Fleurus, the writers’ house of Columbia University, are co-sponsoring the event. Attendance is open and no RSVP is required.

Fall readings

I'll be reading a few times this fall — so far:

October 8 — NYC — "Behind the Book" benefit at KGB — with Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances) (This is, I believe, the third EP/RG reading).

October 25 — Sleepy Hollow (!!) — I'll be reading with Christine Lehner (Absent a Miracle) at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center.

November 12 — NYC — I team up again with Sung J. Woo (Everything Asian), this time at the Dirty Laundry reading series.

Tomorrow (4/29)! Book Culture!

Tomorrow night (Weds.) at 7, Ed reads from Personal Days and talks to Damion Searls, a noted translator (Walser, Rilke, et al.) and the author of a dazzling book of short fiction, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going. This event is at Book Culture, 112th St. off Broadway. (Click here to see the poster.)

My blurb for WWD&WWG begins: "I've read books this pleasurable before, but most of them have been in my dreams..."

* * *

And next Monday (5/4), come hear Ed's talk, "The Amnesia of Influence," at the Columbia Alumni Association's Café Arts evening at PicNic (101st and 102nd)—$10 (includes free drink...you'll need it...)

Between 4th and 100th

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

In my twenties I memorized the prices of the cheap meals I regularly ate — the lunch special at Taj Mahal on 4th Street, for example, or the big roast chicken at the now defunct Cuban Chinese place near 100th. I would make sure I had the exact change necessary for the tip, so that I could put the money on the table and leave quickly. I don’t know that this had any value beyond contributing to my ability to tell you this story now, years later.

—"Ed Park Regrets This Interview," The L Magazine

Reading this Thursday (4/29), 7 p.m. at Book Culture, with Mr. Damion Searls (What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going).

Tonight at 6:30 in NYC

3/12: Ed reads from PD at the Gallatin Teacher's Reading with Sharon Friedman and Ritty Lukose.

It's at the Bronfman Center on 7 E. 10th St.

* * *

Last night he dreamt he had to buy a manga called Aztec Camera.

* * *

The Hartford Advocate on Personal Days and other layoff lit:

Park's novel is both comforting and terrifying in its dead-on-ness. It perfectly captures the gritty angst of the workplace: the sort-of-weird quasi-friendships that form over drinks and talk of work and other coworkers; the awkwardness that squeamishly comes with the laying off of a colleague; the dull, maddening meaninglessness of business-speak. Park illustrates the office so well you could literally cry. That's dramatic, perhaps, but so is the unbearable tension of waiting for an unspecified number of your colleagues to get "the tap" from a shifty-looking HR dude (or dudette).

February is Personal Month

Two readings this month!

1. On Wednesday, Feb. 18, I'll be reading at the Ding Dong Lounge (929 Columbus Ave., btw. 105 & 106), along with James Yeh and other gifted students from Columbia's Writing Division. Starts at 8.

2. On Thursday, Feb. 26, I'll be reading at Word bookstore (126 Franklin St.) in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. My co-readers are Deb Olin Unferth and Brian Baise. Starts at 7:30. (Map here. I'm going to need it!)

These two locales could not be farther apart.

EP on the Radio — Tues. 10/21 at c. 8:40 p.m.

Ed will be on WBAI's Asia Pacific Forum tonight (10/21), beginning around 8:40 until 9 or so. You can listen online; New Yorkers can tune in to 99.5 FM.

(More about Asia Pacific Forum here.)

And at 7 p.m. on Thurs., 10/23, he'll be reading at the Asian American Writers' Workshop (16 W. 32nd St., 10th floor) with Monica Ferrell (The Answer Is Always Yes).

Two more readings

Next month, EP will be reading twice in New York:

1. Authors for Obama (10/19), with Paul Beatty, Nick Flynn, Elissa Schappell, Gary Shteyngart, Anthony Swofford, and actress Lili Taylor

2. Asian American Writers' Workshop (10/23), with fellow debut novelist Monica Ferrell

Times essay — Brooklyn Book Festival

1. “To forget we must not know we are doing so, or else we are not forgetting”: Read Ed's essay on 9/11 in the New York Times.

2. For the second year in a row, Ed will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival. On Sunday, September 14, at 5 p.m. on the Mainstage, Ed will join fellow debut novelists Charles Bock (Beautiful Children) and Chuck Klosterman (Downtown Owl).



Photo of EP (with Rob Sheffield) by Adrian Kinloch, from last year's Brooklyn Book Festival.

Park Personal Pegasus

EP at Pegasus Books (aka Pendragon), Berkeley, June 19.
Photo by Veti_Vert

PD downtown!

On Thursday, July 10, at 7:30, EP will be reading as part of the St. Mark's Bookshop Reading Series, with Leni Zumas.

Don't go to the bookstore, though—the reading is at Solas (232 E. 9th St., btw Send and Third Aves.)

A ROUGH SKETCH:


See you there?!

Screen savers

EP reads at Google, 6/18
(Photo by Jane Lee)

Brooklyn — Interview-o-Rama

— TONIGHT —
EP in Brooklyn!
7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble on Court Street.
(More info here.)

* * *

A new crop of EP interviews:

¶ Who Walk in Brooklyn ("About narrative constraints in Personal Days, I was going to say: Yes! But then I thought, What is freedom?")
¶ The Publishing Spot (in five bite-size pieces)
¶ Mediabistro (subscription required—I, EP, haven't even read this one, so someone tell me what it's all about...)
¶ The Star-Ledger ("If you are going to write a novel about restructuring a company, you should have a structure that is changing, that is being restructured.")
¶ Metromix ("It was a lot of writing and then reading things over and tossing out anything that wasn’t working.")
¶ LAist ("I am going to endeavor not to start any new blogs for a while. This vow will last about a week.")

And don't forget—

¶ Triple Canopy ("For me, fiction writing requires giving in to the unconscious; more alarmingly put, hearing voices, falling into a trance, or even hallucinating. Which might be why Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of the Unconscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has had such a lasting hold on me...")

Personal Days in L.A.!

Ed will be reading at Book Soup (8818 W. Sunset Blvd) in Los Angeles today 6/20—

Ed Park's first novel covers the ground between the rolling chair and the desk; the fax machine and the water cooler. "Personal Days" decodes the office politics of an unnamed New York company from the perspective of a group of distinct characters so enmeshed, they're not really quite sure how they got there in the first place. Or how to get out. Sounds like life around here. —Metromix Los Angeles

EP in Berkeley tonight!

Ed will be reading from Personal Days at Pegasus Books Downtown at 7:30 p.m. (not a.m.!)...
And tomorrow, 6/20, he'll be at Book Soup in L.A. at 7 p.m.

Why am I writing in the third person?