Ed Park in Conversation with Yiyun Li—Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties
Advertisement
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.
“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. 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 Labyrinth and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Program in Creative Writing, and Humanities Council.
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.
“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. 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 Labyrinth and Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Program in Creative Writing, and Humanities Council.
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
Labyrinth Books Princeton, 122 Nassau St, Princeton, NJ 08542-4516, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherLabyrinth Books Princeton
