Author Ed Park has been published in more places than you can count. The founding editor of The Believer, his work has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker. He's also the founding editor of the culture magazine, The Believer. His latest work, Weird Menace, is a hilarious Audible Original featuring lasers, aliens and even spaceships. But when Park isn't writing out-of-this-world satire, he's listening to inspiring and hard-hitting audiobooks. Here are his favorite listens.
Gaddis’s 1975 masterpiece rearranged my brain cells. It stars an 11-year-old financial whiz kid and is told almost entirely in furiously funny dialogue that registers every stammer and non sequitur. The audio is a tour de force, thanks to Nick Sullivan’s delirious quick-change approach to the dozens—hundreds?—of characters jabbering within. For 37 hours.
Nothing comes close to Leyner’s brand of surrealist, pop-culture-saturated humor. It’s hard to describe this listen, except to say that it purports at times to be the backstory to an ethnological study of Chalazia (a hyperviolent, nonexistent European country), conducted by Leyner and his daughter Gabby, all of it framed as an impossibly witty and profane text that’s being read through a phoropter at an optometrist’s office.
For some Asian Americans, the annus horribilis brought about by Covid-19 has been exacerbated by the anti-Asian sentiment experienced across the country. Paula Yoo’s book is a bracing reminder that this prejudice has always existed here. Yoo reinvents the true-crime genre with this well-reported, panoramic investigation of a 1982 tragedy.
Dear Capricorn,’ reads a newspaper horoscope in Sara Davis’s enigmatic debut, *’*don’t be afraid to connect the dots. The path between events that may seem unrelated may soon become clear.‘ May is the operational word in this perfect nightmare of a novel, narrated by a determined bastard (I mean that literally).
I loved (and, full disclosure, edited) this novel, which should have found a huge audience. Set in the ’70s, it’s got Mormon factions, teenage lust, and—no joke—the iconic stuntman Evel Knievel. I can conjure the movie version of my dreams thanks to this note-perfect audiobook.
