September Bonus Episode
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What is the Mandelverse and how does it connect Emily Mandel’s novels?
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and welcome to our show, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing. I'm best-selling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Cece Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary. Hi everyone, I am so excited about today's author interview. Our guest is the author of six previous novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2022. Her other novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama's list, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and has been translated into 26 languages. and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Penn Faulkner Award and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other honors.
It's been translated into 37 languages and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles. It's my pleasure to welcome Emily St. John Mandel. Emily, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
I am so excited about this interview. I'm a super fan. I've read Station Eleven so many times. I've taught it. All your other books, I'm now having to reread multiple times and we'll get into that shortly why. For those of you who are not watching on YouTube, I'm holding up the book we're discussing today, Exit Party. And I just want to tell you, I'm wearing my book drunkard t-shirt because yeah it's so cool because on the 19th of October I'll be interviewing Emily at Blue Heron Books as part of their book drunkard festival so anyone who's near Ontario on the 19th of October please come out to that event it's one of my favorite Canadian indies and we're super excited for that okay I'm quickly going to read the flap copy and then we're diving in Emily we've got so much ground to cover
So, Los Angeles, 2031. The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommates pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silver Lake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment. People drink and dance. A woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tin foil. And then a shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger, stumbles through the crowd and out into the night. and Karim, the party's host, vanishes into thin air. As Ari unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece, where weapons dealer hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon.
An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety and the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the fate of cataclysmic change.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Mandelverse and how does it connect Emily Mandel’s novels?
0:00–12:53
2
How does Emily Mandel write without a plan and treat first drafts as raw material?
12:53–24:53
3
What techniques does Emily use to keep continuity and track character timelines in Exit Party?
24:53–35:35
4
Why does Emily experiment with multiple points of view and switch between first‑ and third‑person?
35:35–45:51
5
How do editors shape Emily’s manuscript and what role do they play in the revision process?
45:51–56:19
6
What inspired Chloe Benjamin’s novel Understory and how did real‑world science influence its plot?
56:19–1:07:17
7
How did Chloe research Antarctica for Understory without ever visiting McMurdo?
1:07:17–1:19:14
8
What decisions guided the ambiguous ending of Understory and why was it intentional?
1:19:14–1:28:21
Speakers
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