by Ed Park
< ACKNOWLEDGMENTS >
I’m grateful to Maureen Howard and James Browning, for years of encouragement; my eagle-eyed sister, Aileen Park; Jenny Davidson and Eugene Cho, esteemed structural and restructural advisors on this project; Julia Cheiffetz and PJ Mark and Julia once again. I’d like to salute all at The Believer, Team Dizzies, and the Poetry Foundation; friends from Voice days, especially constant interlocutor Dennis Lim; Ros Porter, Alex Bowler, and Jynne Martin; early readers and listeners, including Benjamin Strong, Nicole Bond, Rachel Aviv, and Aimee Kelley. Many thanks to my father and mother and the delightful Duncan, to friends who’ve been waiting forever, and to all my family on both coasts, other continents.
This book goes out with all my love to my wife, Sandra—not just the beauty but also the brains of the whole operation.
Ed Park was born in 1970 in Buffalo, New York. He is a founding editor of The Believer, the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement, and an editor at the Poetry Foundation. His articles have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Modern Painters, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Manhattan, where he publishes The New-York Ghost. Visit him online at ed-park.com.
Personal Days is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2008 by Ed Park
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Run,” words and music by Peter Hook, Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, and John Denver, copyright © 1989 by Vitalturn Co. Ltd. and Cherry Lane Music. All rights on behalf of Vitalturn Co. Ltd administered by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Park, Ed.
Personal days: a novel/Ed Park.
p. cm.
1. Offices—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Office politics—Fiction. 4. Corporate reorganizations—Fiction. 5. Satire. I. Title.
PS3616 .A7432P47 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007040834
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-731-0
v3.0
