Other Stories

Cover art Rosalie Winard. Introduction by Micahel Swanwick.

Other Stories is the major new short fiction collection by Paul Park. Here are fifteen stories, including two novellas and two tales appearing here for the first time; all exhibit the writer’s trademark qualities of finely honed prose, cunning narrative construction, and complex characters caught up in mysterious, disorienting events. These protagonists confront potent challenges to their most basic assumptions and perceptions — and this is true for the reader also. Paul Park is a master of oblique implication amid formal eloquence.

“Every character in a story... has a purpose and a secret purpose. Which is another way of saying a person isn’t whole unless they’re hiding something... One of the purposes of fiction, and perhaps its chief one, is to reveal what those hidden things are, so that we might learn from them to understand human beings better. But it also seems to me to be the great theme of Paul Park’s fiction.

“The hardest of all things to find are those which are hidden in plain sight. Most of his stories have been published as science fictionor fantasy. But I think he is best understood not as a genre writer but as a writer of Paul Park stories. Read them with an alert eye and an open mind. Leave your expectations at the door.” — Michael Swanwick, from the introduction