Our own Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel The Lola Quartet not only released this month but also made Maud Newton’s travel list (so you know it’s good!), sits down with Brad Listi for an Other People Podcast.
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Our own Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel The Lola Quartet not only released this month but also made Maud Newton’s travel list (so you know it’s good!), sits down with Brad Listi for an Other People Podcast.

“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.” -Emily St. John Mandel rereads The Best of Saki  [Image via The Guardian]
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“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.” -Emily St. John Mandel rereads The Best of Saki 

[Image via The Guardian]

Riot Asks: Emily St. John Mandel

Source: bookriot

Jason Rice: If you could travel one year in time, in either direction, which would it be, and why?

Emily St. John Mandel: In all honesty, I’d prefer not to travel a year in either direction. But if I HAD to go one way or the other, I’d go backward. I was just looking at my calendar, and at this time last year I went to see a play I really liked (Tony Kushner’s Perestroika) with my husband and two of my dearest friends. It was a nice evening and I wouldn’t mind seeing that play again.
Jason Rice interviewed our own Emily St. John Mandel yesterday. They talk about her new book, The Lola Quartet, which celebrates its One Day Old birthday today.
I’d spent quite a few years asking editors and publishers to take a chance on my writing. It felt like the right time to take that chance myself.
Dallas Hudgens on self-publishing his collection of short stories Wake Up, We’re Here.

Source: themillions.com

Titles have a way of coming in waves. There was a time a few years back when it seemed like vast numbers of books were being published on the subject of secret lives, as in THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES, THE SECRET LIFE OF BUILDINGS, THE SECRET LIVES OF WORDS, etc. Our literature seems to hold a parallel obsession with vanishing, which involves of course any number of titles involving the words “Disappear” or “Vanishing” or “Lost.”

But no trend that I’ve ever noticed has seemed quite so pervasive as the daughter phenomenon. Seriously, once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. A recent issue of Shelf Awareness had ads for both THE SAUSAGE MAKER’S DAUGHTERS and THE WITCH’S DAUGHTER. I’m Facebook friends with the authors of THE HUMMINGBIRD’S DAUGHTER, THE BAKER’S DAUGHTER, THE CALLIGRAPHER’S DAUGHTER, and THE MURDERER’S DAUGHTER, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The ___’s Daughter by Emily St. John Mandel
The villains are chilling; the order of veiled monks who stalk Joe and Edie are a hive-mind nightmare who remind me of nothing so much as the Borg.
Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker reviewed by Emily St. John Mandel
“Angelmaker is Nick Harkaway’s second novel. His first, The Gone-Away World, had the distinction of being entirely uncategorizable: it’s a dystopian adventure, it’s a love story, it’s literary, there are monsters. It inspired unusual devotion among the booksellers of my acquaintance. It can’t have been an easy act to follow.” — Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker reviewed by Emily St. John Mandel
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“Angelmaker is Nick Harkaway’s second novel. His first, The Gone-Away World, had the distinction of being entirely uncategorizable: it’s a dystopian adventure, it’s a love story, it’s literary, there are monsters. It inspired unusual devotion among the booksellers of my acquaintance. It can’t have been an easy act to follow.”

— Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker reviewed by Emily St. John Mandel

Némirovsky writes with tremendous compassion, particularly for the utterly blameless Michauds, but she is unsparing in her assessment of her crueler and more thoughtless characters. Following the exodus in “Storm in June,” the second-oldest Péricand child — Hubert, a teenager — sits in a church and contemplates his family’s behavior during their flight from the city: He judged his family with bitterness and a painful harshness. His grievances whirled around in his mind in the form of brief, violent images, without him being able to express them clearly: …their cars full to bursting with fine linen and silver caught up among the refugees, and his mother, pointing to women and children forced to walk with just a few bits of clothing wrapped in a piece of cloth, saying, “Do you see how good our Lord Jesus is? Just think, we could be those unfortunate wretches!” Hypocrites, frauds! It’s a cliché to say that times of disaster and upheaval reveal us for who we are, but I believe there’s some truth to it. Irène Némirovsky’s characters are variously revealed by war and dangerous politics to be weak, courageous, venal, or honorable, and she knew of what she wrote. She was Jewish, born in Russia, the daughter of a fantastically successful banker. The Némirovskys had fled the Bolsheviks and arrived in a country where they believed they’d be safe. Irène Némirovsky embraced France completely, and for a time, at least, France seemed to embrace her. She found fame as a novelist at twenty-six and was catapulted into French literary society. But by the time she began Suite Française in 1941, the same editors and critics who’d celebrated her before the war had turned away. Her letters went unanswered. Anti-Semitic tirades were published by her former friends. Her books were removed from her first publisher’s catalogue. Words written in her notebook in 1941: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honor and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters.” The betrayal was absolute. Excerpted from Emily St. John Mandel’s “Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, and The Mirador” which was nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily Literary Award.
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Némirovsky writes with tremendous compassion, particularly for the utterly blameless Michauds, but she is unsparing in her assessment of her crueler and more thoughtless characters. Following the exodus in “Storm in June,” the second-oldest Péricand child — Hubert, a teenager — sits in a church and contemplates his family’s behavior during their flight from the city:

He judged his family with bitterness and a painful harshness. His grievances whirled around in his mind in the form of brief, violent images, without him being able to express them clearly: …their cars full to bursting with fine linen and silver caught up among the refugees, and his mother, pointing to women and children forced to walk with just a few bits of clothing wrapped in a piece of cloth, saying, “Do you see how good our Lord Jesus is? Just think, we could be those unfortunate wretches!” Hypocrites, frauds!

It’s a cliché to say that times of disaster and upheaval reveal us for who we are, but I believe there’s some truth to it. Irène Némirovsky’s characters are variously revealed by war and dangerous politics to be weak, courageous, venal, or honorable, and she knew of what she wrote.

She was Jewish, born in Russia, the daughter of a fantastically successful banker. The Némirovskys had fled the Bolsheviks and arrived in a country where they believed they’d be safe. Irène Némirovsky embraced France completely, and for a time, at least, France seemed to embrace her. She found fame as a novelist at twenty-six and was catapulted into French literary society. But by the time she began Suite Française in 1941, the same editors and critics who’d celebrated her before the war had turned away. Her letters went unanswered. Anti-Semitic tirades were published by her former friends. Her books were removed from her first publisher’s catalogue.

Words written in her notebook in 1941: “My God! What is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honor and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters.” The betrayal was absolute.

Excerpted from Emily St. John Mandel’s “Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française, and The Mirador” which was nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily Literary Award.

Source: themillions.com

“I do have tremendous respect for authors who are willing to present unlikable narrators, and what Stein is laying out, in prose so lucid and simple that she makes it seem effortless, is a variation on American young adulthood so common that it does, I believe, deserve a place in our literature. A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 85 percent of that year’s college graduates planned on moving back in with their parents. It would be heartless to imagine that at least some of those graduates weren’t exactly thrilled with this prospect.” — Arrested Development: Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan by Emily St. John Mandel [Image]
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“I do have tremendous respect for authors who are willing to present unlikable narrators, and what Stein is laying out, in prose so lucid and simple that she makes it seem effortless, is a variation on American young adulthood so common that it does, I believe, deserve a place in our literature. A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 85 percent of that year’s college graduates planned on moving back in with their parents. It would be heartless to imagine that at least some of those graduates weren’t exactly thrilled with this prospect.”

— Arrested Development: Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan by Emily St. John Mandel

[Image]