Tag Archives: Personal Days

Ed Park: The FPP Harlem Interview

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FPP Harlem spoke with our “first person corporate” author Ed Park (Personal Days) about walls of prose that resemble Chinese calligraphy, the opportunities afforded by the first person plural voice, and faded gyro posters from 1997.

Can you tell us a little about your current writing project?

What began as a modest collection of my short pieces (both fiction and nonfiction) has turned into something else. The working title is Two Laptops, which is also the title for several of the new pieces in the book. The new pieces (or ideas for new ones) are now bumping out many of the old ones (i.e., the initial premise/scaffolding). The working title is imposing some sort of new, more interesting order on the material. To read more of this interview, go here.

In The New Inquiry: Ed Park’s Personal Days, First Person Corporate?

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Anton Steinpilz offers a thoughtful and in-depth analysis of characteristics the neoliberal novel in The New Inquiry.  He considers Ed Park’s Personal Days as part of that emerging project.  “Here Park manages to articulate a narrative point of view you might call first-person corporate — which, incidentally, he marshals throughout the whole of Personal Days to great effect, giving new impetus and texture to Dilbertian anomie. The resonances with Tretyakov’s biography of the object are obvious; but whereas Tretyakov points toward overcoming workers’ alienation, Park simply characterizes such alienation in terms consistent with 21st-century work life. Tretyakov imagines a novel without a hero. Park imagines one without a reader.”  For the entire essay, click here.