{"product_id":"same-bed-different-dreams-isbn-9780812988321","title":"Same Bed Different Dreams","description":"\u003cb\u003ePULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present—loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered. . . . A \u003ci\u003eGravity’s Rainbow\u003c\/i\u003e for another war, an unfinished war.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Fortress of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cb\u003eWINNER OF THE \u003ci\u003eLOS ANGELES TIMES \u003c\/i\u003eBOOK PRIZE\u003c\/b\u003e • ONE OF \u003ci\u003ePUBLISHERS WEEKLY\u003c\/i\u003e’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • \u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW \u003c\/i\u003eEDITORS\u003cb\u003e’\u003c\/b\u003e CHOICE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, \u003c\/i\u003eChicago Public Library, \u003ci\u003ePolygon, Kirkus Reviews \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South split that remains today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut what if the KPG still existed—now working toward a unified Korea, secretly pulling levers to further its aims? \u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams \u003c\/i\u003eweaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSoon Sheen, a former writer now employed by the tech behemoth GLOAT, comes into possession of an unfinished book seemingly authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a riveting revisionist history, connecting famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project—everyone from Syngman Rhee and architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London and Marilyn Monroe. \u003ci\u003eM*A*S*H\u003c\/i\u003e is in here, too, as are the Moonies and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Reagan-era downing of a passenger plane that puts the world on the brink of war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the acclaimed author of \u003ci\u003ePersonal Days, Same Bed Different Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e is a raucously funny feat of imagination and a thrilling meld of history and fiction that pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.“It’s a challenging read and yet wonderfully suspenseful, like watching a circus performer juggle a dozen torches; will one slip his agile hands? Park seeks to encompass the vast Korean diaspora, but he’s also fleeing realism, a personal diaspora, away from conventional forms ... \u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e struts confidently across registers — lyrical, deadpan, acerbic, comedic — while doling out clues. Characters rotate in and out, some glimpsed in passing, their motives opaque ... Sprawling, stunning.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Mind-bending…Weaves in plot threads involving big tech and science fiction, and like a particularly feverish Philip K. Dick or Thomas Pynchon yarn, \u003ci\u003eBed \u003c\/i\u003eis constantly questioning the nature of the reality we think we know…The book is rooted in beautifully rendered characters, whose tales of separation and division mirror Korea’s own complex history.” \u003cb\u003e—\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Ed Park’s latest book—rich with errant wordplay, historical high jinks, and a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial—takes its place in the great tradition of the American systems novel.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Ed Park’s blisteringly entertaining newest entangles a mythic manuscript, a sprawling Korean Provisional Government, and a veteran-cum-sci-fi novelist to brilliant effect.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eVanity Fair \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Ingeniously plotted, astoundingly original, and often wickedly funny, \u003ci\u003eSame Bed, Different Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e is a singular work from a singular mind.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eEsquire\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Formally ambitious …. a wild, often speculative trip through 100 years of Korean history.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Somehow, novelist and literary editor Ed Park manages to seamlessly pack elements of techno-dystopia, real and imagined Korean history, and a dose of American pop culture into this sweeping novel. While this is a work of fiction, its handling of alternate histories and the influence of social media make it a shockingly relevant portal into our near future.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “I’m in awe of this book—a brilliant postmodern romp rife with nested narratives, imaginary novels, and ecstatic digressions, which happen to be all of my favorite things. It’s a breath of fresh air, really—novels are never ambitious in quite this way anymore, and I almost forgot how good it feels to be dunked in someone else’s extravagant puzzle-making. (The brain-exploding qualities call to mind Infinite Jest while being much friendlier to read; I suspect it will be widely compared to Pynchon, and probably DeLillo, but Park’s moment-to-moment generic flexibility also brings peak David Mitchell to mind.)”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLit Hub\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e“Genius . . . \u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams \u003c\/i\u003eis an extraordinary—and \u003ci\u003ehilarious\u003c\/i\u003e—genre-busting nesting doll of comedy, science fiction, and thriller and, at its core, an epic compendium of Korean history that’s also the dark history of American foreign entanglements. It’s like no other novel I’ve read before—a cabinet of wonders that demands to be read and reread.”\u003cb\u003e—Cathy Park Hong, author of \u003ci\u003eMinor Feelings\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“I can’t stop reading, thinking, and dreaming about this feverish, mind-altering marvel of a book.”\u003cb\u003e—Hua Hsu, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of \u003ci\u003eStay True\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Your view of twentieth-century history will be enlarged and altered by Ed Park’s mysterious, panoramic novel. It\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eseems to draw on Bolaño, Pynchon, and DeWitt for its radical structure, yet remains grounded in a droll, sweet voice we’ve wished to hear again since \u003ci\u003ePersonal Days\u003c\/i\u003e. This is a \u003ci\u003eGravity’s Rainbow\u003c\/i\u003e for another war, an unfinished war. Having been enlisted in the Korean Provisional Government, I now await my instructions.”\u003cb\u003e—Jonathan Lethem, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Fortress of Solitude\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A book of dizzying scope and erudition . . . very funny, intimate, and playful and interested in basic questions of existence, beginning with: Why are we here and what gives us meaning?”\u003cb\u003e—Dave Eggers, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Circle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A novel to get lost in and a feat of imagination . . . I read it with awe for its construction and for the sheer pleasure of its language.”\u003cb\u003e—Charles Yu, National Book Award–winning author of \u003ci\u003eInterior Chinatown\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Totally astounding . . . \u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams \u003c\/i\u003eemits a prismatic intelligence operating on multiple frequencies. I didn’t know I’d been waiting for a book like this until I encountered it.”\u003cb\u003e—Ling Ma, author of \u003ci\u003eSeverance\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams \u003c\/i\u003eis a kaleidoscope of Koreamericana; a crowd of cracked voices; a gorgeous, hilarious, provisional dream; a wonder.”\u003cb\u003e—Namwali Serpell, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Furrows\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“No blurb could adequately praise or even sum up this novel. All I know is that\u003ci\u003e Same Bed Different Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e belongs in the company of a rare few dark and comic masterpieces of invention. It disarmed me with sheer delight.”\u003cb\u003e—Elizabeth McKenzie, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Portable Veblen\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Park blurs fact and fiction so seamlessly that search results will undoubtedly surprise if not shock, albeit not without reverential delight.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBooklist, \u003c\/i\u003estarred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Beguiling, deliberately knotty ... A brash, rangy, sui generis feat of speculative fiction.\"\u003cb\u003e—Kirkus Reviews, starred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Park returns fifteen years after \u003ci\u003ePersonal Days\u003c\/i\u003e with an ingenious postmodern epic of colonial and postcolonial Korea framed in a satire of America’s publishing and tech industries . . . This tribute to the fractured peninsula’s citizens, diaspora, and allies is one for the ages.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eEd Park\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the novels \u003ci\u003ePersonal Days \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eSame Bed Different Dreams\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe is a founding editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Believer, \u003c\/i\u003eand has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic,\u003c\/i\u003e and elsewhere\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.\u003cb\u003eWhat is history?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat is the question, that is the job. Might a deeper understanding of history benefit the company, or is it to be avoided at all costs? Teams are told to blue-sky it, whiteboard it, list out pros and cons. When you break the word down, what does it tell you? The Latin, from the Greek.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThree telegenic academics discuss it at an all-hands. The first speaker, an American wunderkind, sports a headset with a purple-foamed mic that resembles a levitating gumdrop on the jumbotron. “History,” she intones as she paces, “from the same Indo-European root that gave us wit.” She mimes tearing out and crumpling her notes, to signal Enough with the old ways. In the last decade, she says, history has toppled from the king of disciplines to a numbing data set: a litany of trackable moments, the realm of machines.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe stands at the lip of the stage. Everything you buy, view, read, and believe gets recorded. Where you drive, how you sleep. Lusts and peccadilloes. Mental lapses, steps climbed. Debits and credits, search terms and activity logs. Only by going off the grid can one enter true history. “Abolish every clock,” she concludes. “Go back to Day Zero.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA concerned murmur. Is this a dig at the company and its voracious tab keeping? Or will this radical reset somehow help them do their job? The workers clap politely.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Day Zero?” comes a coy query, from the second historian. “Hmm.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe’s her former adviser. White hair, black eyebrows, with a mustache that splits the difference. Remaining seated, he offers a rambling anecdote by way of rebuttal. Early in his career, while engrossed in some eighteenth-century grain ledgers, he brooded over the meaning of history. One afternoon, sharpening a pencil, he received the answer, a metaphor that perfectly captured his calling. He wrote it down and continued his work amid those humble documents.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFour years passed, as he labored on the monograph he was sure would secure his reputation. Nearly finished, he prepared the coup de grâce: his shattering insight into the true nature of history. Now, alas, the full formula eluded him. After days of searching, he located the slip of paper with the aperçu at the bottom of his satchel. To his horror, a summer storm had reduced it to a blank white scrap. The more he tried recalling the words, the less sure he was about anything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe crowd takes it all down. A cough booms through the speakers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“My old friend asserts we should avoid metaphor when it comes to history,” sniffs the third panelist, a cheeky maverick of indecipherable ethnicity, gender, and height. “Yet the nostalgic scene he presents is itself a new metaphor, as apt and useless as all others, by his own definition. What is history, you ask? A message from a genius, ruined by the rain.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor two hours, the three scholars spar, drawing on video games, mirror neurons, some minor works of Poe. They speak to be quoted, and the audience of employees sits rapt. For the most part. During the debate, someone secretly records a colleague pinching his own thighs, struggling to keep his eyes open—to no avail. Soon the man is snoring. Onstage, the first scholar booms, “What is history?” The subject wakes with a start, slurps back some drool.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe video gets forwarded, bcc’d, uploaded, liked. The self-pincher’s face is only half visible, but the gist is clear. As the clip makes the rounds, viewers add captions, crude animations. It becomes a sort of folk tale, bristling with embellishment. It speaks to current events, pop culture, the environment. Versions leak outside the organization: jumping borders and slipping into foreign tongues. Spin-offs exist that are not safe for work. This fading, drooling figure in the crowd is part of history, too, even if the official transcript omits the incident.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat is history?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt least for now, it’s a three-way standoff, a memory of rain, a cure for insomnia. These possibilities are duly entered into the system.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Sins August The Jury\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom a distance, the black smoking station on the white pavement in front of the Admiral Yi resembled a chess piece, whether bishop or knight, I couldn’t decide. The matter seemed crucial as I approached. My daughter, Story, would have an opinion, but of course she wasn’t with me. She was seven, and chess figured prominently in her life. During one game, in the midst of crushing my kingside defenses, she said that the bishop was worth three points, same as a knight. (Then she put me in check.) The fact surprised me. I had reckoned bishops on par with rooks, knights a step below. Then again, the bishops were yoked to their starting colors, as though you were playing checkers. Perhaps the smoking station was just a pawn after all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDusk hung like velvet over West Thirty-second Street, what the sign called Korea Way, though I have never heard anyone use that name. I was in the city, on a weeknight no less, a rare event for me. My family and job were upstate in Dogskill, an hour and change via Metro-North. Not so very far; still, I didn’t like visiting Manhattan. It made me miss everything too much.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy appearance was a solid for Tanner Slow: old college roommate, dispenser of numerous good deeds on my behalf, and main link to the life I’d led years ago. Tanner had worn many hats over the years. He’d been a music journalist, fired for not liking music, and briefly a literary agent—he sold my first and only book, a story collection that I couldn’t bear to look at anymore. He once ran a Tucson charity that gave bikes to the homeless, and even worked at GLOAT in the aughts, hiring me during his brief tenure. But after his father the vitamin king died and left him a zillion dollars, Tanner set up the Slow Press, devoted to his three idiosyncratic passions: political graphic novels done with woodcuts, niche cookbooks, and neglected literature in translation. Last season he’d released a revisionist account of the Haymarket Riot, a set of Malaysian curry recipes that could be done using only a rice cooker, and a collection of nature essays by “Uganda’s E. B. White.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTonight was simple. Tonight I’d meet Tanner Slow’s newest author, Cho Eujin, once the enfant terrible of South Korean letters. The Slow Press had signed on to bring out his oeuvre in America, and he would be a visiting lecturer at Rue University Extension Campus that fall. Tanner swore I’d like him. I couldn’t find a clear picture of Cho online, but in my mind he resembled my father, gone now over thirty years. Also slated to appear was the reclusive artist Mercy Pang, another camera avoider. My wife, Nora, was pretty sure she’d babysat for her back in the ’90s, and wanted me to take a picture so she could check.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDespite the warmth of the day, I planned to lay into a tasty bowl of seolleongtang or kalguksu, down a few OBs, and say good night to one and all in my bad Korean. I’d make sure not to get roped into a karaoke situation. I was already rehearsing my exit line, the one about having to catch the train back home out of Grand Central.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTonight would have been a rare treat—a pleasant evening with one of my oldest friends and his latest discovery—if not for all the Asian American literati who threatened to show up as well. Poets and editors and folks associated with Rue University’s “Wildword” program. I’d mix up people’s names. I’d have nothing to say to them. I was no longer in the game.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey viewed me as a traitor. My employer, GLOAT, was so vast that it almost lost definition—they all used at least a few of its many features—but in their eyes, I’d abandoned the life of the mind to service the Almighty Algorithm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was true that I didn’t write anymore. For a while, I kept story notes, and one summer even wrestled a novel partway out of my skull. It had proved too unwieldy, even dangerous: a hydra that spoke in tongues. I mapped out the plot on yard-high Post-its, slapped them on the walls while I wrote. Nora likened it to the handiwork of a cop trying to outguess a serial killer, or maybe the other way around.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI didn’t write anymore. My current fictioneering was limited to bedtime tales spun out for my daughter as a sleeping aid. They involved UFOs, her chief interest besides chess. I was good at describing alien spacecrafts zipping through the clouds and the capture of curious Earthlings with a tractor beam. Once the quarry got on board, though, I went into numbing detail about the layout of the control room, lulling Story to dreamland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI didn’t write anymore. My last jab at literary journalism had been years ago, for the late lamented Lament, which had since gone from elegant bimonthly to wisp of a quarterly to dysfunctional website, before disappearing completely. “Clean Sheets” was a jeu d’esprit about the titles I’d salvaged, to Nora’s dismay, from the basement laundry rooms of apartments where we used to live. The essay posited that these castoff libraries—self-help tomes, mouse-munched thrillers, hiking guides in foreign languages—told a building’s secret history. It was my love letter to the city; right before it came out, we moved to Dogskill. When the issue arrived, I put it directly into the recycling bin. On Friday morning I wheeled the bin to the curb, where at 9:13 a truck with a robot arm held it aloft, turned it over to release the empty bottles and printed matter, then replaced it before driving off: the quintessential suburban port de bras.One of the New York Times Notable Books of the year; Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233529114853,"sku":"NP9780812988321","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812988321_f298620e-dba1-4878-b802-25f044e1b040.jpg?v=1767736079","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/same-bed-different-dreams-isbn-9780812988321","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}