Articles by Emily St. John Mandel
March 10, 2010
Through the Looking Glass: Notes on Disappearance 11
People don’t disappear nearly as often in real life as they do in fiction. We’re fascinated, as a culture, by the idea of vanishing.
March 9, 2010
The Last Train from Hiroshima 1
Henry Holt & Company stopped printing and selling Charles Pellegrino’s The Last Train From Hiroshima last week, following allegations of fraudulent sources and fabrication in the work. The New York Times examines the debacle: “If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers,” novelist and Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson asks, “tell me exactly what [...]
February 23, 2010
Brooklyn Underdog: Hesh Kestin’s The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats 6
Shoeshine Cats is admirable in part for its tinge of the improbable, its impossible suavité and secret rooms. Kestin catches us up in a gritty enchantment.
February 15, 2010
Every Day The Same Dream 5
Even aside from the sad beauty of the game’s gray world, I was thinking about it the other day and I realized part of its appeal: it reminds me, in its very existence, of what the Internet used to be.
January 22, 2010
Kafka’s last living friend remembers 0
Alice Herz-Sommer, a 106-year-old Holocaust survivor and the last living person who knew Franz Kafka personally, reminisces about her friend in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: “Kafka was a slightly strange man…”
January 22, 2010
The Music in My Head 11
A while ago I began wondering if I might use music to my advantage somehow. Because if music exerts the sway over us that I think it does, I might use it to help me ignore the distractions of the outside world.
