Thurs 9/17 @ 6:00PM--PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Ed Park discusses his new book with Yiyun Li. Three Tenses is 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.

“Wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches . . . Park seeks to encompass the vast Korean diaspora, but he’s also fleeing realism, a personal diaspora, away from conventional forms. . . . Sprawling, stunning.”—The New York Times Book Review

“By turns tongue-in-cheek, elegiac, dreamlike and magical-realist . . . an ode to imagination.”—The Washington Post

“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

Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.

Yiyun Li is the author of Things in Nature Merely Grow, which won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir. Her many books include Wednesday's Child; The Book of Goose; Where Reasons End; Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and others. Her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Li’s honors and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal, a 2023 International Writer Award from the Royal Society of Literature, the 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, and many others. In 2026, Li was named to the TIME 100 List of Most Influential People. She is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts and Program in Creative Writing and Labyrinth Books.