An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories

Park’s (writing, Princeton Univ.; Same Bed Different Dreams) startlingly original and nearly plotless stories repeatedly disrupt readers’ imaginations. A focus on narrative kicks off the collection, quickly settling into mood and quirky observation. In the opening story, an author writes to his novel’s translator to complain that he has mistranslated everything and added characters, situations, and objects to the book that aren’t in the original. In another tale, a writer invents an app that alters his novel’s text as the audience reads it—there’s no returning to the original. A third bibliocentric story features a woman who spends seven years polishing one paragraph of text, then refuses to let it be published. The longest story is a dialogue between a director and an actress as they record a Blu-ray commentary track for a B-movie epic in which she plays Lt. Carapace of the 124th Interstellar Battalion. There’s also a tale narrated by Tina, who lives on an island with 17 other women named Tina. Park’s antecedents are writers like Julio Cortazar and David Markson, which is high praise.