Paul Park is one of modern fiction’s major innovators. With exotic settings and characters truly alien and disturbingly normal, his novels and stories explore the shifting interface between traditional narrative and luminous dream, all in the service of a deeper humanism.
“Climate Change,” original to this volume, is an intimate and erotic take on a global environmental crisis. “A Resistance to Theory” chronicles the passionate (and bloody) competition between the armed adherents of postmodern literary schools. “A Conversation with the Author” gives readers a harrowing look behind the curtains of an MFA program. In “A Brief History of SF” a fan encounters the ruined man who first glimpsed the ruined cities of Mars. “Creative Nonfiction” showcases a professor’s eager collaboration with a student intent on wrecking his career. The only nonfiction piece, “A Homily for Good Friday,” was delivered to a stunned congregation at a New England church.
Plus: Our candid and colorful Outspoken Interview with one of today’s most accomplished and least conventional authors, in which personal truth is evaded, engaged, and altered, all in one shot.
About the Author
A native of New England with Southern roots, Paul Park climaxed his “wanderjahr” in Asia and the Middle East with his Sugar Rain Trilogy, which established him immediately as a writer to watch. His fascinated readers have since followed him into Christian theology, the anatomy of colonialism, and the limits and possibilities of metafictional narrative. His diverse work includes narrations of museum exhibits with artist Steven Vitiello, and lectures on storytelling at Comicon and nonhuman sentience at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute. Meanwhile he has taught writing in a thirty-year career at major universities. He lives in western Massachusetts and currently teaches at Williams College.
What People Are Saying
“Paul Park is a brilliant, stunning, frightening writer, a major talent.” Gene Wolfe
“Paul Park is one of the most gifted and subtle story writers I know.” Jonathan Lethem
“Entering a Paul Park universe means slipping into an eerily compelling plane where nearly palpable visions transform as disturbing as the images in a sexually charged fever dream.” Publishers Weekly
“Complex, elusive, haunting, written in a transparent prose that slips you from one world to another with prestidigitous ease.” Ursula K. Le Guin
“Paul Park’s short stories are blunt, funny, distressing, strange, true—all these qualities, often all at once.” Kim Stanley Robinson