Three Tenses cover art

Three Tenses

Pre-order free with Premium Plus
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Three Tenses

By: Ed Park
Pre-order free with Premium Plus

Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Pre-order for $19.99

Pre-order for $19.99

About this listen

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.
Art & Literature Artists, Architects & Photographers Essays
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.