Articles by Emily St. John Mandel
May 10, 2012
Staff Pick: H.H. Munro’s The Best of Saki 7
H.H. Munro wrote a great many light and often very funny send-ups of the stifling conventions and manners of the Edwardian age. But on the other hand, three of the first eight stories in the book involve corpses, with two of these being small children eaten by wild animals.
April 27, 2012
Adventures in Self-Publishing: Dallas Hudgens’ Wake Up, We’re Here 8
Hudgens doesn’t shy away from the brutality of life on earth — the illness, the decreptitude, the humiliations and the teen suicides — but the grittiness is never gratuitous, and his stories are infused with compassion and humanity.
March 28, 2012
The ___’s Daughter 66
To be clear, I think there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling one’s book The ___’s Daughter. I think those titles have a marvelous rhythm to them. And yet one can’t help but wonder why there seem to be so many of them.
March 20, 2012
Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker 1
Harkaway manages to write surrealist adventure novels that feel both urgent and relevant. His novels are fun to read without seeming particularly frivolous, and beneath all the derring-do and shenanigans, there’s a low thrum of anxiety: everything and everyone you love could disappear at any moment. There is nothing that you cannot lose.
February 22, 2012
Arrested Development: Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan 16
I’ve been thinking lately about adulthood. When it begins, what expectations we might reasonably have of those just entering through its gates, and how we represent it in our fiction.
January 19, 2012
Dark Pensées: Fraser Nixon’s The Man Who Killed 2
Fraser Nixon’s debut novel is a fast, sharp piece of work. Novels with plots and titles like this one are easily filed under crime fiction, but this is one of countless instances where artificial divisions of genre do readers a disservice.
