The American paperback.
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Emily St. John Mandel
I hope everyone had an enjoyable long weekend! Mine was spent on/in various balconies, backyards and rooftops drinking various beverages. Definitely a promising summer preview.
I’m heading off to Minneapolis this week, so I won’t be doing an events post, but I did want to share a delightful book launch I went to late last week. Brooklyn-based author Emily St. John Mandel presented her newest novel, The Lola Quartet, at WORD Bookstore last Thursday. True to the book’s jazz theme, it was a classy affair. -
In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks—he couldn’t find the kind he liked best, but close enough—and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn’t in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don’t exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna’s name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room.
— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet
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The Lola Quartet was playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn’t smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him.
— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet
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He felt that he was slipping, but it wasn’t just him. The city of New York had gone dark so quickly, and at times Gavin was dazzled by the speed of the fall. Because it hadn’t actually been that long since he’d been walking hand in hand with Karen down Columbus Avenue and they’d come upon a newsstand with a New York Magazine cover that read “The Second Gilded Age” in gold letters, and the headline had seemed perfect to him. This is the second gilded age, he’d tell himself, looking around at his fellow diners at expensive restaurants or studying photographs of $1.3 million one-bedroom apartments in the windows of real estate offices. The phrase fit the era. But within months the stock market had plummeted and banks were collapsing, everyone was losing their jobs and there were food shortages in the soup kitchens, and the second gilded age seemed distant.
— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet
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There was an afternoon spent staggering through swamps under a wide-brimmed hat, listening to a park ranger named William Chandler talk about the new monsters that had been appearing since the early ’90s. The creatures in the Florida swamps were terrifying and new, and the canals delivered the swamps to the suburbs. Experts speculated that some of the animals had been blown deep into the swamps by Hurricane Andrew—greenhouses that had held snakes had been found shattered and empty once the storm had passed—but most were abandoned pets. Small glittering lizards who’d seemed manageable enough when they were babies but then outgrew aquarium after aquarium until they’d become seven-foot-long two-hundred-pound Nile monitors with eerily intelligent eyes and extravagantly pebbled skin, perfectly capable of eating a small dog.
— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet
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Thank you, booksellers!
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Announcing… the #1 Indie Next Pick for May! Thank you indie booksellers!!!!
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Author Stalker: Five whole dollars! I'm an author! →
A few months ago, I interviewed one of my favorite contemporary authors, Emily St. John Mandel, for Overflow magazine. She was just as funny, thoughtful, and interesting as I had imagined, and the article is now online for all to enjoy.
She’s also incredibly photogenic. …
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The Small Demons Blog: An Incomplete Catalogue of Influences →
A fabulous essay by Unbridled author, Emily St. John Mandel…
1. The structural pyrotechnicians
I’ve been fascinated by questions of structure since before I started writing novels. A great many of the books and movies that I love most are entirely linear—Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song—but there’s…
