Between 4th and 100th

Have you ever been a Starving Artist, and did it make you brilliant, or just hungry?

In my twenties I memorized the prices of the cheap meals I regularly ate — the lunch special at Taj Mahal on 4th Street, for example, or the big roast chicken at the now defunct Cuban Chinese place near 100th. I would make sure I had the exact change necessary for the tip, so that I could put the money on the table and leave quickly. I don’t know that this had any value beyond contributing to my ability to tell you this story now, years later.

—"Ed Park Regrets This Interview," The L Magazine

Reading this Thursday (4/29), 7 p.m. at Book Culture, with Mr. Damion Searls (What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going).

Flexing that giddiness

Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits names Personal Days of the year's top 10 books! (Here's the Bat Segundo interview from earlier this year.)...

...Commonweal includes it in its Christmas Critics roundup—click here to see...

...and...a "former African dictator" gives it a thumbs-up:

Park shows both the cramped spaces and bizarrely profound social investments we make in our co-workers' lives by telling the stories of a dozen mid-level employees of a moribund company, marooned on an increasingly empty floor of a New York high rise. Together, they're bound in anxiety over losing their jobs, excitement at the sudden independence of being fired and terror of doing anything to draw attention to themselves. Oddly, this semi-oblivion engrosses them. The best jokes come from the office. So do the freshest ironic nightmares. It's the most entertaining thing they have, but no one wants to ask too seriously if perhaps that's because it's all they have. —Et Tu, Mr. Destructo?

Two interviews

1. With Dylan Foley, for the Newark Star-Ledger.

2. With Lilit Marcus, for Save the Assistants.

L Magazine, and a reading at KGB

The summer fiction issue of The L Magazine—free in print and online!—includes EP's "Variations on Original Sin," a part of the novel-in-progress The Dizzies.

New Yorkers! Come here Ed read at KGB on Thursday, July 31, 7 p.m.! With fellow L-mag contributor April Wilder. More info here.

Read what New York magazine has to say...This will be EP's last reading of the summer!

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In other PD news—

Canada's National Post has a "guaranteed summer read"—Personal Days.

And EP jabbers somewhere in the midst of this Korean American radio show out of Chicago (is it called "Ill-Rated"?).

Transatlanticism

In the U.K.: "[Personal Days] offers a very modern insight into the way we work now." —Independent

And in the U.S.: Ed tries to define success for Time Out New York.

EP on the radio

Ed will be on WFMU this morning, talking about Personal Days with Benjamen Walker, on his show Theory of Everything. Tune in online!

Update: Here's the playlist, featuring songs ("Work Is a Four-Letter Word"!), readings from PD, and cubicle shots from listeners:

Brooklyn — Interview-o-Rama

— TONIGHT —
EP in Brooklyn!
7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble on Court Street.
(More info here.)

* * *

A new crop of EP interviews:

¶ Who Walk in Brooklyn ("About narrative constraints in Personal Days, I was going to say: Yes! But then I thought, What is freedom?")
¶ The Publishing Spot (in five bite-size pieces)
¶ Mediabistro (subscription required—I, EP, haven't even read this one, so someone tell me what it's all about...)
¶ The Star-Ledger ("If you are going to write a novel about restructuring a company, you should have a structure that is changing, that is being restructured.")
¶ Metromix ("It was a lot of writing and then reading things over and tossing out anything that wasn’t working.")
¶ LAist ("I am going to endeavor not to start any new blogs for a while. This vow will last about a week.")

And don't forget—

¶ Triple Canopy ("For me, fiction writing requires giving in to the unconscious; more alarmingly put, hearing voices, falling into a trance, or even hallucinating. Which might be why Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of the Unconscious in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind has had such a lasting hold on me...")

Guided by voices

EP tells all to Rachel Aviv at Triple Canopy:

Jaynes’s audacious thesis—that early man did not possess consciousness—makes you ponder the very nature of an interior life. Why do we have two brain hemispheres, and why does everyone—writer or not—have the experience of silently talking to oneself, weighing options, narrating everyday life? Who is talking to whom?

Labour Day

—Dazed & Confused, No. 161

When Ed meets Ed

Edward Champion interviews Ed Park for The Bat Segundo Show.

Listen to the clatter of silverware at the Metro Diner!

"I would be very rigorous about counting how many words I wrote in a day..."

And tomorrow (5/21): Stop by McNally Robinson, where Ed P. will read from Personal Days and talk to his editor!