Articles by Emily St. John Mandel
October 4, 2012
Susanna Moore, Cheryl Strayed, and the Place Where the Writers Work 8
What matters is good writing, what matters is that there are people who love books enough to press them into your hands in far-off cities. We are here for the books, but I think it’s easy to get distracted by our longing for success and forget this.
September 6, 2012
Eating Dirt: On Charlotte Gill and the Life of the Treeplanter 1
Gill’s stories are fascinating, but she is possessed of that rarest of attributes among memoirists: an understanding of her own story as only a part of a broader picture, a willingness to broaden the focus beyond the particulars of her personal experience.
September 4, 2012
Disorientation: A Reading List 10
“Do you believe,” the journalist asked, “or fear, that the world is a mirage, or a hoax?”
August 21, 2012
Everything is a Question: Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray 10
Is he alive, or is he dead? There are moments in this very funny, very ghoulish novella when he seems definitely one or the other; other moments when he might somehow be both. He’s roughly the fictional equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat.
July 31, 2012
Staff Pick: Saul Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection 2
Do the ones who save us owe us anything? The Bellarosa Connection is fascinating as a study of memory and regret.
June 26, 2012
Dispatches from an Opium Den: Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis 1
Jeet Thayil’s debut novel is an unsettling portrait of a seething city, a beautifully-written meditation on addiction, sex, friendship, dreams, and murder.