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:

Personal Days—arbiter of fashion?

Welcome to the newsroom

From Pinky's Paperhaus:

Personal Days, real world version
Ed Park’s novel Personal Days is set in a company drastically downsizing. This flickr set of the empty spaces left behind as the San Jose Mercury News downsizes perfectly illustrates what I pictured as the novel’s workspaces. I guess it made the rounds earlier this year, but it’s back in the news — the longtime designer who took the photos was just told he’s been laid off, too.

PD trivia

How is the pose in the NYT author pic a coded reference to one of Ed's favorite authors, Harry Stephen Keeler?

(Click here for the answer.)

"A layoff narrative for our times"

From Mark Sarvas's review of Personal Days in today's New York Times Book Review:

There’s a dark undercurrent to all the whimsy, a Beckettian dread as co-worker after co-worker is blasted out of the desolate landscape....Anyone who has ever groaned to hear “impact” used as a verb will cheer as Park skewers the avatars of corporate speak, hellbent on debasing the language....

[I]n the last section — a bravura e-mail soliloquy reminiscent of Molly Bloom — Park uses the first person, and the intensely personal section floods this black-and-white newsreel with vivid color. In a single, fluid release of emotion and truth, the mysteries of the layoffs are solved and a measure of humanity is reclaimed. It is a heartfelt antidote to the comic bleakness of the first two sections.

Park has written what one of his characters calls “a layoff narrative” for our times. As the economy continues its free fall, Park’s book may serve as a handy guide for navigating unemployment and uncertainty. Does anyone who isn’t a journalist think there can’t be two books on the same subject at the same time? We need as many as we can get right now.
Photo: Chester Higgins Jr.

Screen savers

EP reads at Google, 6/18
(Photo by Jane Lee)

From "Three First Novels That Just Might Last" (TIME magazine, July 7)

THE BOOK
Personal Days by Ed Park

THE SETUP
Some office drones work at a moribund company. That's really all Park needs

WHY IT'S GOOD
Never have the minutiae of office life been so lovingly cataloged and collated

FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE ...
The Mezzanine, Then We Came to the End (a book it superficially resembles, but only superficially)

—Time