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Biographical Note: "By turns tongue-in-cheek, elegiac, dreamlike and magical-realist . . . an ode to imagination." --The Washington Post "A palpable joy on the page . . . Irony has never had it so good." --Los Angeles Times "Ingeniously plotted, astoundingly original, and often wickedly funny . . . a singular work from a singular mind." --Esquire "A cocktail of his obsessions: experimental language, pop-culture oddities, screwball characters, cutting-edge technologies, and political conflicts across the globe. Yet he's a poet of the heart as well as an intellectual archivist, his commitment to art captured in inventive forms." --Time "Rich with errant wordplay, historical high jinks, and a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial." --The New York Review of Books "A merry prankster who sees straight to the core of our humanity." --The Boston Globe Publisher Marketing: An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family's cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses. The piece of writing that Park found--"a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again"--was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the page: within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become. Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action. Review Citations:
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