Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties by Park, Ed

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.

Author: Ed Park
Publisher: Random House
Published: 08/11/2026
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9798217154944

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/18/2026
Booklist 07/01/2026
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2026

About the Author
Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; and An Oral History of Atlantis, his debut story collection. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. Born in Buffalo, Park lives in Manhattan with his family. He currently teaches writing at Princeton University.