Ed Park reading at Newtonville

This Thursday, June 12, at 7 pm. More info here.

Park, a cofounder of The Believer, will be reading from his first novel, "Personal Days."

Former Ideas columnist James Parker things highly of the novel, which is set in and satirizes the contemporary white-collar workspace. Over at Barnes & Noble, Parker explains:

Park is one of the founding editors of the literary monthly The Believer, a publication I have always resented for its peculiar and persistent quality of delightfulness, like that of a gifted child whose prattle is distracting his parents from serving the drinks. In the wake of his novel, though, I see that I will probably have to revise this sullen prejudice, because "Personal Days" is another thing altogether -- neither anxiously nor prodigiously brilliant, but quite maturely and pitilessly so.

More recently, writing for The Boston Phoenix about recent office-based novels, Parker writes:

Production is all: to survive, to persist in the office, you must either produce or diligently manufacture the illusion thereof.... But what if you don't feel like playing the game -- or if you just won't? The great parable of corporate non-performance is Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener," in which a lawyer's assistant, a pale transcriber of documents, engineers a sort of one-man economic slowdown. With the immortal words "I would prefer not to," Bartleby phlegmatically declines to do first this thing, then that, and then the other, until finally he is doing nothing at all. Crucially, though, he refuses to leave the office: he remains there, silent and ghostly in aspect, like a supernatural reproach to his colleagues -- and to work itself. His employer is confounded: "Say now," he pleads after a few weeks of this, "that you will begin to examine papers tomorrow or the next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable: -- say so, Bartleby." "At present," comes the reply, "I would prefer not to be a little reasonable." Enervated by such "passive resistance," the lawyer finds he is morally unable to have Bartleby ejected from the premises: instead he moves his whole office, leaving Bartleby behind. Bartleby is taken at last to prison, where -- clinging with grim fidelity, like a mystic, to his principle of doing bugger-all -- he declines to eat, and so wastes away. "Ah Bartleby!" laments his employer. "Ah humanity!" "Bartleby the Scrivener" was written in 1853, while the unborn spirits of Kafka, Borges, Barry, Ferris, and Park looked on with deep interest.

Great stuff!