American · b. 1970
Ed Park writes novels that feel like they're written in the margins of other books. Born in Buffalo in 1970 to Korean immigrant parents, he moved to New York and became a central figure in the city's literary world: founding editor of The Believer, fiction editor at The New Yorker, books editor at The Village Voice. His debut novel Personal Days (2008) was a comic masterpiece about office life, written in a dizzying collective voice that captured cubicle paranoia with perfect pitch. Fifteen years later, Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) did something wilder—a novel about Korean history, science fiction, video games, and a secret society that might or might not exist, formally experimental and emotionally searching. Both novels demonstrate his gift for making literary play feel like life-and-death stakes.