>> Anne Holmes: Hello,
and welcome to the
National Book Festival.
My name is Anne Holmes from
the Library of Congress,
and I'm here with Emily St.
John Mandel whose featured book
at the festival is
The Glass Hotel.
If you'd like to
see her presentation
at the festival you can do
so on the fiction stage.
Welcome Emily.
It's good to have you here.
>> Emily St. John
Mandel: Thank you so much.
I wish I could be
there in person
but I'm grateful
for the technology.
>> Anne Holmes: I know.
We wish the same but are
grateful that you're able
to join us in this
virtual capacity.
So as folks are starting
to publish their questions,
and please audience members,
put any question into the Q&A
that you would like
Emily to answer.
As I kick things off, Emily,
I wonder if you could talk
to us a little bit
about what the spark was
for The Glass Hotel.
>> Emily St. John Mandel: Sure.
Absolutely.
The Glass Hotel, you
know, to be honest,
like just for some context here,
I have been struggling to come
up with, you know, the
elevator pitch for this book
for literally three years.
It's just like, it's really
hard to describe succinctly,
but there's a massive white
collar crime at the center
of the story, a Ponzi scheme,
and although every character
in this book is completely
fictional, the inspiration
for that story line was the
Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme
which imploded in
December of 2008.
And, you know, I was
fascinated by that crime,
partly just for the scale.
That was a $65 billion with
a b, dollar Ponzi scheme.
It may have affected as
many as a million people,
so that was kind of staggering.
But the thing that really
captured my imagination was the
idea of the staff in a
massive white collar crime.
So at the time the story
broke, I had a really great job
for a writer, a really
great day job.
I was a part-time
administrative assistant
in a cancer research lab
at the Rockefeller
University in New York.
It was a really great job.
I really liked my coworkers.
It was a really great team.
And what I found myself thinking
about was just the camaraderie
that you have with
any group of people.
You know, you're showing up
to work together every day.
Not so much during a
pandemic, but you know,
in theory you're showing up
to work together every day.
There's a sense of
shared mission.
Now imagine how much crazier
and weirder and more intense
that would be if the activity
you were showing up for
on Monday morning was
committing a crime.
Like, you know, you're
all showing
up at work to defraud investors.
That office dynamic is
just so fascinating to me
to think about, so I just
found myself thinking,
you know, who are these people?
Like, what story would
you have to tell yourself
if you were somebody working
in that very strange office?
What story would you have
to tell yourself in order
to meet your spouse's eye
across the dinner table,
sleep at night, show up
to work the next morning?
So the first chapter of
the book that I wrote
after a dozen rounds
of revisions,
eventually became
Chapter 10 in the book,
a chapter called The
Office Chorus that's told
from the perspective
of the Ponzi staff.
So yeah, that was the
starting point for me
and then the book
branched off in all kinds
of very strange directions.
>> Anne Holmes: Great.
Thank you so much.
So we've got a lot of questions
here from the audience.
Jill asks, would you consider
working with an artist
to create the graphic novel
featured in Station Eleven?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: I
would love to at some point.
Yeah. There was even a time
years ago when I was working
on the script for the comic book
for the Dr. Eleven comic books,
and it was just kind of too
much Station Eleven in my life.
At that point, this would have
been two thous -- no, 2015.
I'd been doing this epic
Station Eleven promotional tour
and I was just more and more
drawn toward writing my new book
at the time which eventually
became The Glass Hotel.
So yeah. It's something that I
am very theoretically interested
in but haven't quite
managed to pull it together
and find the time, but
I would love to someday.
>> Anne Holmes: Great.
And another question
about Station Eleven,
Susan would like to know, as
we live through this pandemic,
do you feel in any
way better prepared
after the time you spent writing
and researching Station Eleven?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
Not really, to be honest.
I did a lot of research into
the history of pandemics,
so maybe that made it a
little bit less shocking,
the fact of it, than it might
have been otherwise, because,
you know, if you
research that history,
what quickly becomes clear
is that epidemiologists,
they talk about pandemics in the
same way that seismologists talk
about earthquakes, which is
to say, that nobody ever talks
in terms of, I wonder if
there will ever again be
another earthquake.
You know, there will always
be another earthquake.
There will always
be another pandemic.
But knowing intellectually
that there will always
be another pandemic is
of course not the same thing
as experiencing the terror
and the isolation of actually
living through a pandemic.
So yeah, I don't think it
really gave me any special edge
to be honest.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
Jane would like to know what
you've been reading lately.
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
This is kind of obnoxious
because the book hasn't
actually been published yet,
but I sometimes get
sent books months
or even a year before
they come out.
I'm reading a book called
The Other Black Girl
by Zakiya Dalila Harris
and she was actually --
I was drawn to the book because
it sounded really compelling.
It's a -- it seems like it's
going to turn into a thriller
about a woman working in a New
York City publishing office.
And I was also drawn
to it, to be honest,
because Zakiya was my Knopf
editor's editorial assistant
for a while so we used to
exchange email about scheduling
and then all of a sudden she
has this book coming out.
So that's a book
that I just started.
It's really compelling so far.
Other books I've read
lately that I really liked,
I read a book fairly
recently called Migrations
by Charlotte McConaghy.
She's a Australian writer.
It's pretty dark.
It's climate fiction, I guess.
But it's so beautifully
written and so harrowing.
So yeah, those are a couple
that I've been into lately,
off the top of my head.
>> Anne Holmes: Great.
And Arlene would like to know,
what author would you consider
to have been your
primary inspiration
in becoming an author?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
It's a great question.
I feel like there were a few
who were really important.
You know, I was born
and raised in Canada
and in Canada the cannon leans
pretty heavily toward Michael
Ondaatje, who I'm not sure
that he's super well known here
but it's the author of
The English Patient.
I read The English
Patient when I was about 14
and it made a huge
impression on me.
I was already writing
by that point.
It's something that I've
done since I was a kid,
but I think of that as the book
that showed me how
beautiful prose can be.
So that one was really
important.
And then a very different kind
of novel was important
to me later.
So I wrote my first novel in
my 20s, Last Night in Montreal.
And I think that I -- I think
I kind of fell into this trap
that a lot of first
time novelists fall
into where you kind of know
that you've got some skill
at this whole writing
fiction thing
and it can get a
little ornate, you know?
Sentences kind of like
wrap around themselves
and get a little fussy,
kind of overly complicated.
And after I wrote that book I
read Norman Mailer's novel The
Executioner's Song.
I find Mailer kind
of hit or miss.
I truly dislike some
of his books
but I think The Executioner's
Song is a masterpiece
and it completely
changed the way I write.
It's written in the most
spare, lucid, pared-down style
and yeah, I read that.
I think it changed my
prose style forever.
I began to aspire toward,
I guess greater simplicity
in the prose.
So yeah. If I had
to name two books,
I think those would be the ones.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
Alice asks, what message
would you want readers to take
from The Glass Hotel
and Station Eleven?
Both were great at showing
how we're all interconnected.
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
That's a nice idea.
Thank you.
You know, I've always
resisted the idea
of a book with a message.
And I think that comes down
to my preferences as a reader
where I've definitely had the
experience a few times of,
you know, I'm reading a novel.
I'm really enjoying
it, and then it's
like the authorial message
sledgehammer hits me
over the head and it's like
the message of this book is --
and in the worse cases
it can feel like kind
of a Trojan horse problem,
where it's like you realize the
novel was a delivery mechanism
for this particular message.
An idea I really
like that runs contra
to that was really well
expressed by Edmund Wilson,
a writer and critic active
in New York in the 50s.
he had a line that
I really love.
He said, no two readers
ever read the same book.
And I think that's
true, you know?
We all come with the books
we read through the lens
of our own particular
experiences and what kind
of day we're having and
what kind of, you know,
how much coffee we've had,
like, all these variables.
And I like the idea that ten
different readers could read
Station Eleven or The
Glass Hotel and come away
with ten different ideas
of what the book was about
or what it really meant or,
you know, what the message is.
I kind of feel like that's fine.
I have this kind of feeling
of detachment where I feel
like a reader's relationship
with my book,
it's almost none of my business.
I kind of feel like
it's a private matter
between the reader and the book.
So yeah. I was definitely
thinking
about interconnectedness as I
was writing both books and cause
and effect, but I've always been
hesitant to ascribe, you know,
a specific message that I
think people should take away
from the book.
>> Anne Holmes: Thanks.
So Katie says, hi Emily.
In the recording,
your festival video,
you said you don't really
write an outline before you
start writing.
Could you tell us a little
more about your process?
>> Emily St. John
Mandel: Yeah, sure.
It's messy.
That's the headline
to my process.
I'm going to preface this
by saying I believe there's
no right way to write a novel.
You know, the way that works for
you is the right way to do it.
So I definitely know writers
who have a complete
outline before they sit down
and that's what works for them.
My process is I'll just
have an idea for a scene
and I'll just start writing
a scene and see what happens.
And you know, you just
kind of spin it out.
You expand on it.
A scene then turns into ten
pages and then maybe a chapter
and as I'm writing,
I'm kind of figuring
out who the characters are.
And then so for me it's just
kind of a matter of expanding
on that, so I'll, you know, I'll
work on a particular story line.
I very often write myself
into corners so, you know,
I remember in particular
with Station Eleven
writing those three chapters
or whatever it is
at the beginning
from Jeevan's perspective.
And then having this
moment of, wait,
what was I doing
with this character?
Where was I going
with the storyline?
And it was fine because
I could just jump
to a completely different point
in the book and write a couple
of Miranda chapters,
and then figure
out how it call came
together later.
So I do a lot of that.
I just kind of write scenes.
I write chapters.
Often I jump around
wildly in time.
When I get stuck in a
particular storyline
or with a particular
character, I set it aside
and write something else.
I put it all together like
a kind of jigsaw puzzle
as I go along, you
know, kind of looking
for the greatest
possible tension
and the strongest
possible narrative arc.
And after about year of that,
I have the most unbelievably
messy first draft.
And, you know, for me my
first drafts are so messy
that when I have a
complete book, you know,
just in the sense of having a
beginning, a middle, and an end,
I'm less than halfway
through the process.
Like, it's not really a huge
cause for celebration for me,
because I know that what lies
ahead of me is like two years
of revision, so, you
know, or four years
in the case of The Glass Hotel.
So yeah. So then I just revise
that first draft over and over
and over again, and
I feel like that's
where anything remotely
good happens.
So that's where the
characters go from being almost
like two dimensional cutouts
or placeholders into being,
you know, hopefully something
a little better developed.
That's where huge holes
in the plot are fixed,
or the plot's changed
completely.
Any kind of refinement
or stylistic flourish
in the prose is coming
through revision as well.
Also connections in
the book, you know,
I'll have people ask me,
well, like, you know,
how did you connect
that, your Chapter 3
to Chapter 70, or whatever?
Well, because I read the book
17 times and thought, oh,
it'd be cool to connect
these two things together.
So yeah. I really feel like I
find the novel in the revisions
and that's how I do it.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank
you so much.
Christina -- and this question
has been upvoted a lot --
asks, did you have any
paranormal influences
that led you to include that
element in The Glass Hotel?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: Yeah.
Reddit, actually.
You know, I did a lot of touring
for Station Eleven and I feel
like reading the
creepy pasta threads
in Reddit is the worst possible
thing to do in a hotel room
at night, and yet
I would often do it
and just completely
creep myself out.
So yeah. You know, that was,
those were the most recent
ghost stories I read.
But I have always
sought out the genre.
Ever since I was a kid
I've loved ghost stories.
So yeah. You know, it's just --
it's been an interest of
mine for a very long time.
>> Anne Holmes: And
Alice would like to know,
what prompted your switch
from dancing to writing?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
I just kind of burned
out on the dancing.
Yeah, dance was all I had
wanted to do from the time I was
about six years old to when
I graduated from the school
of Toronto Dance Theater
when I would have been --
I guess I would have
just turned 21.
And I don't know what happened
in the last couple
of years of dancing.
But I just found I
didn't love it anymore.
Sometimes the thing that you're
driven to do it can somehow
like imperceptively change
from being a pleasure
to being a chore.
You know, from this thing
you really want to do,
to this thing you have to do.
And yeah. There was
just no more joy in it.
I didn't love it anymore.
But at the time I'd, yeah, I
had a massive student loan debt
from the dance conservatory that
I went to, so it never occurred
to me to go back to school.
I felt like that
wasn't really an option.
And so I found myself
thinking, well, what could I do?
Like, what comes next?
And I've been writing since
I was eight years old,
just these little short stories
and poems that I never showed
to anybody, but it was
something I really loved
and I found myself
thinking, well,
maybe I could take this
more seriously, you know,
turn it from a hobby
into a career.
So I started writing what
eventually became my first
novel, Last Night in Montreal.
So yeah. It was a really -- it
was a gradual process of going
from thinking of myself to a
dancer who sometimes wrote,
to a writer who sometimes
danced,
to just really committing
to the writing.
>> Anne Holmes: Yeah.
Patricia asks, what is the
most surprising thing you've
discovered while doing
research for one of your books?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
This is a really small thing,
but I did a lot of research
into the shipping industry
for The Glass Hotel
and for Station Eleven.
Those boats are so
huge and there are
so few people aboard, you know?
This boat the size of seven
football fields will have 20
people keeping the
whole thing running.
So that kind of surprised me.
I was also surprised by the
frequency of pandemics, I guess.
You know, I'd always sort of
thought in terms of, you know,
the Black Plague, like the
ones that you hear about a lot.
But just realizing the ravages
of smallpox on this continent
over the centuries and
yeah, and just kind
of how frequently it happens
that a pandemic comes along,
which is obviously sort of
horribly relevant now, but yeah.
That was something
I found startling
when I was researching.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank
you so much.
Michelle asks, do you think
you will revisit characters
from Station Eleven
in your future work?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: Yeah.
I think so.
I already did to some extent.
You know, Miranda Carroll and
Leon Prevant are both characters
in The Glass Hotel, but I
also really loved Clark,
the character in the airport in
Station Eleven and I would love
to use him again in something.
I don't know how I'll do
it, but I love the idea.
>> Anne Holmes: Great.
She also asks, can
you tell us anything
about the new novel
you're working on?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: No.
[laughs]. I can tell you
I'm also doing TV work
which has been fun.
I'm adapting The Glass Hotel.
Yeah, the new novel, you know,
it's the situation is it's
so early in that even I don't
really know what it's about,
so yeah.
It's a little bit
mysterious, even to me.
>> Anne Holmes: Well Michelle
also asks, and as you mentioned,
what is the status
of your TV series?
How is that going?
>> Emily St. John
Mandel: It's going good.
Thanks for asking.
I just finished the
second script
with my coworker Semi Chellas.
Semi was on Mad Men for years
and she's also Canadian
and yeah.
She just has a deep knowledge of
television and she's a pleasure
to work with so it's been a
really fun process just having a
collaborator for this stuff.
Yeah. We finished
the second script.
We're submitting it to
the production company.
The production company's trying
to close a deal with a director,
and then we're hoping to start
pitching it in the next month
or so, you know, to try
to sell it to a Netflix
or an Apple Studios or
somebody along those lines.
So yeah. It's such a weird
world and I'm still so new
at it, but I'm optimistic.
>> Anne Holmes: Great.
Elaine asks, oh she says,
thank you for your books.
Your stories, structure,
and narrative perspective
are fascinating and make
for very satisfying reads.
I know you talked about
this a little bit already,
but which other authors, if any,
do you take inspirations from?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
You know, I take inspiration
from Jennifer Egan,
another Brooklyn writer.
Her novel A Visit From
the Goon Squad is one
of my very favorite books,
and I think what I find
specifically inspiring,
it's probably the prose
style which I love,
but it's also the
boldness of some
of the choices she
makes around structure.
Yeah. She's inspiring to me.
Also, a writer who died in the
Holocaust, Irene Nemirovksy,
author of Suite Francaise.
That novel it just has --
it's kind of my own
definition of the perfect book.
I hesitate to say that because
there is no perfect novel,
but the prose, it's wonderful.
It just has this
incredible clarity
and elegance and
economy of style.
So yeah. Those are a couple
that I particularly point to.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
Mamie asks, how are current
events influencing your writing?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: I
think current events might come
into the novel I'm writing.
Yeah. It's hard to say.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
Mark has a process question.
Do you write on paper
or on a computer?
Is there software you use to aid
in your extensive
editing process?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
I switch back and forth
between the computer
and pen on paper.
I sometimes find that writing
with a pen slows my brain
down in a way that's
really helpful to me.
So yeah. I feel like there's
something neurological
that happens there, that I like.
So what I like to do is start
off on paper, just for five
or 10 pages and then I'll
start transcribing it
into the laptop and
editing as I go.
Sometimes I like to
just type directly
into the computer, you know?
So I switch back and forth.
There's a lot of freedom for me
in knowing that I'm going to end
up trashing most of my first
draft anyway, you know?
So it's like, just get something
onto the screen, you know,
however I can, and
that's -- yeah.
There's freedom in
knowing it's all going
to be completely
revised and recombined.
In terms of software,
for The Glass Hotel,
which has a fairly complex
structure, I was using Scribner
which was really great.
It's a pretty good setup.
There's text window
that you're typing into
but then you create
these separate files
for different parts of your
document and you can drag
and drop on a pane
on the left side.
So if you're doing something
kind of structurally weird,
like The Glass Hotel and
you want to, you know,
move the order of sections
around, that was really helpful.
But then it started
crashing toward the end
of the editing process and I
went back to Microsoft Word.
So yeah. The new
book, I'm using Notes.
It's the Apple word
processing software.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
We have another question
about filming.
What is your role in the
filming of Station Eleven
and do you find it
satisfying or challenging
to see others run with it?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
I actually have no role
in Station Eleven which they --
so I know the showrunner,
Patrick Somerville.
When I met him, he was
a novelist in Chicago,
but he's been out
in L.A. for years
and has a great career there
as a showrunner and writer.
So we're kind of friends.
We text sometimes.
So I get updates
on Station Eleven,
but by the time the Station
Eleven TV project became real,
when people were
actually working on it,
I was just so deep into
The Glass Hotel and I felt
like I didn't really
want to go backwards
in time to Station Eleven.
So yeah. I have no official
involvement with the series
but I do get updates
every so often.
And for the second
part of the question,
I feel pretty detached,
you know?
I think that in general, writers
fall into one of two camps,
where it's either I need
to shepherd this project
through the transition
into a new genre and see it
through to production,
and then the opposite
of that is just send
me a big check
and do whatever you
want, you know?
I lean a little bit
toward the second option.
I feel like it's inevitably
going to be different
on the screen then it was
on paper and that's fine.
It's a completely
different genre.
I believe that Patrick
Somerville will hold true
to the spirit of the book even
if the plot points are
a little bit different.
Yeah. So I feel like
it's in good hands
and I'm pretty detached from it.
>> Anne Holmes: Thank you.
William asks, I'm curious.
How instrumental are
your editors in terms
of the book in its final form?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
They are very instrumental.
I have kind of an
unusual situation
in that I actually have three
editors who work on the book,
which came about just from the
way we sold Station Eleven,
my agent and I, where we sold it
separately in every territory.
So it's sold in the U.S. so
I had my American Editor,
Jenny Jackson at Knopf.
Then we sold it separately
in Canada.
I had dual citizenship
and it made sense
to have separate publishers.
So then the Canadians
said, well, you know,
we've made an investment here.
We'd like to be involved
in the editing.
So fine, then I had two editors.
Jennifer Lambert in
Canada at Harper Collins.
Then we sold it in the U.K. to
Picador and Picador was like,
well we've kind of
made an investment too.
We'd also like to be involved
in the editing process,
so Sophie Jonathan at
Picador is my third editor,
and we drew the line after three
because it was getting crazy.
But you know, I was really a
bit worried that it would kind
of be this nightmarish
editing-by-committee scenario,
but it turned out to be great.
Having three very intelligent
editors' opinions I really trust
look at my manuscript,
I feel like it just
makes it vastly better
than it would have been
with just one or, you know,
God forbid, if it had just
been me like, with no editor.
So yeah. The process
was pretty similar
with Station Eleven
and The Glass Hotel.
The Glass Hotel, it's
those same three editors
and it's an intense process.
You know, my first
round of editorial notes
for The Glass Hotel, I think it
would be fair to summarize them
as basically, could you
please change everything?
-- so no they -- it
was like, we loved it,
but if you could please change
the structure, the characters,
the dialogue, you
know, everything.
So yeah. I went through
three rounds
of pretty intense rewrites for
The Glass Hotel to get it right.
I sometimes -- it's like
this weird sort of trope.
It almost feels like an
urban legend in publishing
that editors don't edit anymore.
I have no idea where
that came from.
I'm really intensely edited.
So yeah. They just
-- they take my books
and they make them a
hundred times better.
>> Anne Holmes: Thanks.
Alicia has another question
about dancing, so she asks,
as someone who trained in dance,
do you have any urge or aversion
to centering a novel
in the dance world?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
You know, it's funny.
I don't have a conscious
aversion and
yet I've never centered a
novel in the dance world,
and that is my background.
So, I don't know.
I felt like in a weird
way I was almost writing
about the dance world
when I was writing
about the traveling symphony
in Station Eleven, because,
you know, it is an orchestra
but I was absolutely drawing
on my experience
in dance companies
and writing abut the
interpersonal relationships
and the kind of intensity
of touring and performing
with these very talented,
mildly neurotic artists.
So yeah. I kind of felt like I
was mapping my dance experience
onto music with that book.
But yeah. For whatever reason,
I've never been especially drawn
to writing about dance.
I'm not sure why that is.
>> Anne Holmes: Thanks.
So Barbara asks,
where you freaked
out when the real
pandemic struck, and says,
I could not continue
to read Station Eleven.
Scary.
>> Emily St. John Mandel: Yeah.
You know, I don't recommend
reading Station Eleven,
for the record, during
a pandemic.
I feel like I've been very
consistent in that messaging.
Yeah. I wouldn't read it,
a pandemic novel during an
actual pandemic, personally.
I was freaked out.
Yeah. You know, it seemed so
abstract because in this part
of the world we just haven't had
an experience with a pandemic
for 100 years, so it
just wasn't -- yeah.
It did feel a little bit out
of the blue, even though I kind
of knew intellectually that of
course there was always going
to be another pandemic.
Yeah. It was -- I
was freaked out.
I'm in New York City
and it was bad here
at the beginning, you know?
April was pretty dire.
So yeah.
>> Anne Holmes: Thanks.
Rachael follows up on
your discussion earlier
that characters, a
couple characters
from Station Eleven appear in
The Glass Hotel, and she asks,
how did you reconcile that
connection between the stories
with the fact that
the former is not set
in a specified time
period and the latter is?
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
I was thinking of them
as parallel universes and
I tried to sort of lay
that groundwork in both books,
but I know I wasn't
completely successful
because I have gotten
a couple of reviews
that have been really nice
but the reviewer has
said something like,
and The Glass Hotel is clearly
set in the years leading
up to Station Eleven, but what
I tried to do, here was my plan.
In Station Eleven, I realized
pretty early on that I wanted
to use a couple of
the characters again,
which posed a pretty obvious
problem in the context
of a pandemic that
kills most of them.
So toward the end
of Station Eleven,
in one of the post-apocalyptic
chapters, there's a scene
where Kirsten and August are
sitting by the road together
and they're playing this
game that's clearly been part
of their vocabulary for
years, just kind of riffing
on alternate visions
of reality, you know?
A version of reality where that
flu pandemic never happened.
And then what I was trying
to do was lay the groundwork
for the idea of different
versions of reality,
or alternate universes.
And then I tried to echo
that toward the beginning
of The Glass Hotel where Vincent
is kind of playing the same game
but just with herself.
She's kind of wandering around
Manhattan and she's just sort
of riffing on different
versions of reality,
the same way Kirsten
and August were.
So yeah, one of the scenarios
she finds herself thinking
about is, imagine if that
terrifying new swine flu hadn't
been quite so swiftly contained
and if civilization
had collapsed.
So I tried to set up the
idea of parallel tracks,
but I know it's confusing
and I know I probably
could have made it clearer.
>> Anne Holmes: I think
you did very well.
So we are sadly almost at
our time for this session.
So I think we have time
for one more question.
And Angela asks, how
has your experience
in the publishing industry
changed since you started?
Are you excited or
anxious about its future?
>> Emily St. John Mandel: Yeah.
I feel like -- so the short
answer is I guess I'd say I'm
optimistic about its future.
People are reading.
Bookstores are busy.
I've had such varied experience
within the publishing industry.
My first three novels were
published with a tiny press
and then with Station
Eleven I made the jump
to a much larger publisher
and that's where I've stayed.
So I've just had such disparate
experiences than, you know,
the small press world is
so incredibly different
from like the Big
Five world, you know,
with a publisher like Knopf.
So I feel like there hasn't
been enough continuity for me,
like through my career, to have
any kind of cleareyed view of,
you know, how the
experience feels different
at the beginning and now.
>> Anne Holmes: Well thank
you so much, Emily and yeah,
unfortunately we are out of
time but thank you so much
for sharing your time with us --
>> Emily St. John
Mandel: My pleasure.
>> Anne Holmes: --
so generously today.
>> Emily St. John Mandel:
Oh, it's been a pleasure.
Thanks for interviewing me.
>> Anne Holmes: So
we've been speaking
with Emily St. John Mandel,
whose latest book
is The Glass Hotel.
You can find her presentation
on the fiction stage
of the National Book Festival.
And thanks again to our
audience out there for all
of those fantastic questions.
We hope all of you
will take the time
to explore the many programs
at this year's festival.