Review by Booklist Review
Park infuses his debut story collection with the same extraordinary inventiveness that made his novel Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Some stories are cleverly (almost) linear. A "Dear Alumni Notes" letter credits an enigmatic professor for the ubiquitous phrase "It is--what it is" in "The Gift." Two spies meet in Seoul, although one fails the coded-menu test in "Watch Your Step." A first-time novelist goes on a book tour in "Thought and Memory." A dire situation reveals the provenance of a lifetime of passwords in "Slide to Unlock," and literature becomes forever corrupted in "Eat Pray Click." A few characters appear in multiple stories in various incarnations. Hans de Krap, for example, berates an overzealous translator in the deliciously comical opener, "A Note to My Translator;" makes a cameo appearance in "Machine City," about a (meta) Korean American Yale undergrad named Ed acting in his first (and only) film; and narrates the titular final story as a Manhattan teen transplant "do[ing] mundane midget things." In "Weird Menace," a director and actor provide commentary for a collector's edition of their cult film, Weird Menace, while Park can't contain recurring Tina and (palindromic) Hannah in a single story. Throughout his 16 stories, Park deftly upends quotidian expectations, encourages discomfort, and presents surreality with biting humor.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Across these subtly interconnected stories, Park (Same Bed Different Dreams) crafts a world animated by pulp fiction and space operas as much as by the mundane joys and sorrows of modern relationships. In the opener, "A Note to My Translator," the author of a novel titled Mexican Fruitcake decries the dadaist liberties taken by a translator with his hard-boiled prose. Such gems as the unnamed narrator's complaint that "the doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball" set the tone for the tongue-in-cheek humor that suffuses the collection. "Bring on the Dancing Horses" is narrated by a man who grows increasingly jealous when his girlfriend, a literary critic specializing in science fiction, develops a bond with the FedEx courier who regularly delivers review copies and who turns out to be a gifted writer of speculative fiction. "Seven Women" comprises sketches of women whose fates revolve around Hannah Hahn, the elusive but "legendary" editor of a cult literary journal from the late 1980s, including Hannah's stepmother, Dr. Emma Chew, "a revered psychoanalyst in her day." The name Hannah appears in several entries, including the stellar "Weird Menace," a transcript of a conversation between an actress and her director as they rewatch their low-budget sci-fi B movie turned cult classic decades later. Park's delightful tales, which are driven by provocative ideas, strange occurrences, and gripping plots, pay tribute to the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut in the best ways. This pitch-perfect collection will linger in readers' minds for a long time. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (July)
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Review by Library Journal Review
It's rare that a collection as varied as Park's gets a voice cast to match; for this audiobook, nine narrators perform 16 stories. Several of them use unusual formats, such as "Slide to Unlock," narrated by Lee Osorio, which follows password tips and reminders to a shocking end. The opening story, "A Note to My Translator," performed by Raphael Corkhill, initially seems a righteously angry letter from an author but soon leaves listeners to ponder whether the work was always "crap" writing. Even the stories told more traditionally, such as the Shannon Tyo-narrated "Watch Your Step," a tale of friendly spies, twine down to unexpected endings. One story, "Weird Menace," replicates the print version's on-page split formatting by having both Raymond J. Lee and Gabrielle De Cuir narrate a Blu-ray commentary, complete with soundtrack music, drunken tangents, and muffled dialog in the background. The breadth of experiences Park captures with his writing will spawn endless book club debates about which story should be the favorite. VERDICT Listeners will love that so much care and thought was clearly integral to the creation of this audio experience.--Matthew Galloway
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
