YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily St. John Mandel

lines on the record: 85
first: 2020-04-08
most recent: 2020-04-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Feels like a very different scale, and it gives me a new appreciation for why Film Adaptations are so different from the source material. You know, as a reader, your favorite book is adapted to the screen and there's this moment of, wow, they mangled this thing is completely different. Yeah, there's a reason for that. In screenwriting, every scene has to drive the plot forward in a way that it just doesn't really have to in novels. Yeah, learning that skill has been great.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am, yeah. I love writing novels, but after five novels, it's kind of fun to try something completely different. So yeah, that's been kind of a cool collaborative experience. I've been enjoying it.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next project, there is a next project. I'm working on a new novel. I can tell you what another project I've been working on, which is the television adaptation of the Glass Hotel. And that's been fun. It's my first time writing for TV.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nerves of steel, which I definitely didn't always have. You know, by my fifth book, I've kind of gotten to the point where I'm pretty impervious to criticism in a way that I wouldn't have been when I was younger. I got a bad review in the New York Times. And like, I didn't find that it even really ruined my evening, which is kind of surprising. You know, that definitely would have laid me low a couple of books ago. So yeah, tenaciousness. And yeah. Kind of scurdiness.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it stop it? No I stopped it a year after Station 11 came out. Yeah, I was on something like my second tour of the UK and still booking plane travel for my boss, but I didn't book my own travel anymore. It just didn't really make sense anymore.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a lot of cancer research labs at Rockefeller. It's a cool place. It's all science. I was in the Tavizoe lab, which was researching the role of microRNAs in cancer metastasis. I have no science background, but I'd been an administrative assistant in various companies for years before that. So I could do anything with an Excel spreadsheet. So it was a lot of budgets, booking travel for my boss, trying to make the lab run as smoothly as I could. That was a great job. I held on to it for maybe longer than I should have. When did you stop?”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was kind of a weird in between time in my life where I didn't want to be a dancer anymore. And I was just kind of starting to write. Yeah, I was very drawn to being a writer.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. That is correct. Yeah, that's the kind of job you can get in Montreal if you don't speak a word of French. I speak some French now, but I didn't speak any back then. And that was a job I could find. It was actually okay. It was really cold. You know, 7 a.m. in Montreal in the winter, minus 20 Celsius. It was pretty brutal. At the same time, though, if you start work at 7 a.m., you're done by one in the afternoon. So I had time to write in the afternoon. And I was working on my first novel. So it worked out okay.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's possible, yeah. It's a weird thing. I did think in the back of my mind that setting so much of Station 11 in Toronto would make people in Canada think of me more as a Canadian writer. And I don't know if it did or not, to be honest. I did win the Toronto Book Award, which is cool. But yeah, yeah, I don't really, there's such a randomness to awards, you know, ultimately it's just whichever books the five people in the jury liked. So I try not to put too much weight on it. But yeah, it's definitely a better career in the U.S.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not Canada. I don't know why that is, but I definitely feel like I have a much better career in the U.S. than I do in Canada. I've been shortlisted for major American awards. There are three big awards in Canada every year. And I've never even made the long list. So, yeah.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it is, you know, genres work a little bit differently in different countries. And in France, there's this genre that doesn't really exist here. It's called Polar. And this scope of things that fit under Polar, it's huge. So it's everything from vaguely atmospheric literary fiction with kind of like a slight noir tinge to it to three days at the condor, you know. So yeah, it was, my first three novels were categorized as noir. You know, I go to these noir or pilar festivals. I'd sit next to the guy who wrote three days of the condor. So in France, I was a crime writer for my first three books. And it was really kind of interesting and great. Yeah, I had a Wikipedia page in France long before I had one in the US.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Read that and I thought, well, there's no guarantee of future representation here. But worst case scenario, if I take these suggestions, I'll have a better book. So I spent six months revising and then she agreed to read it again and took me on as a client. So yeah, Emily Jacobson of Curtis Brown. She was in her 80s and she took me on. And she died, I think, four years later, pneumonia. She's a real role model for me. She was incredibly sharp right up until the end, an incredible sense of style. And she was really my first champion. She was wonderful.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really nice. So I, you know, I have no training as a writer. I've never even took a workshop. But I wrote a novel, which I finished in my mid-20s. And I started querying literary agents. So my method was, you know, I was cold querying. I didn't know anybody. I would send out a cover letter and three sample chapters. And I just worked my way down a list of New York City literary agents who represented literary fiction. The 13th or 14th person on that list was Emily Jacobson, a Curtis Brown. And she requested the full manuscript and then rejected it. But she rejected it with the most thoughtful, detailed editorial letter. It was the first really substantial feedback that I gotten on the book. And it was basically a list of problems that she had with the book. You know, I didn't understand why character X did Y. I didn't understand this plot point.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very disciplined and conscientious, but I don't really know how I compare to other writers, to be honest. I only have one other close friend who's a writer, and she's at least as disciplined and conscientious as I am. I have a lot of acquaintances who like I don't know well enough to really know what their day-to-day is like. Yeah, I feel like I don't have a good enough pool of comparison.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How In a couple of ways. One way is that dance requires the most incredible discipline. And I think that that's helpful for writing. I think actually it would be helpful for anything. It probably would make you a more disciplined attorney if you'd been a dancer first. It's just pretty hardcore. It's also, to be honest, a much harder career than writing. And I think that's pretty good. There are difficult moments as a writer. But at the same time, what I find myself thinking is, you know, my worst day writing or like the terrible review or whatever it is I'm dealing with, that's still better than a dance audition. You know, never again, hopefully, will I be in a room with 200 other women competing for one job wearing skin tight clothes, the number pinned to my chest? I mean, that's dehumanizing. So yeah, it's helpful to writing kind of in that contrast. I think everything you do after dance probably seems a lot.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah Know, I mean, because there are obviously people who are already there. You know, I've been hearing these crazy stories. I live in Brooklyn, pretty close to Prospect Park, about people congregating for big group play dates, like, you know, 10 or 15 adults and kids in Prospect Park. That seems insane to me. It seems really unethical because, you know, if you need a ventilator because you recklessly mingle with a crowd of people, that's a ventilator that somebody else won't get. So yeah, it's reckless and kind of crazy. For myself, I feel like with our household, you know, my husband and I both have jobs that we can do remotely. We can handle our child. We could keep going this way for a very long time if we needed to. I could do this for months. But there are a lot of people who might not be able to, you know, just very different family circumstances. And yeah.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it pushed me to a large degree on the path that I'm on, kind of in both a positive and negative way. The negative of homeschooling in my case was it was not a particularly well-rounded education. I really didn't get much of a grounding in science or math. And that's regrettable. On the other hand, my parents really loved books. We always had a ton of books in the house. We went to the library every week. So I had an enormous amount of time to read and I was encouraged to read. And there was a period of time when one of the requirements of the curriculum was I had to write something every day. So that's what got me writing in the first place. So I might have had a completely different life if I hadn't had so much time to spend reading and, you know, such a focus on books at such an early age.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's about what I would have expected. I was homeschooled when I was a kid, so I have some background from the other side of the equation. It is intensely time consuming. The wonderful thing about preschool is you drop off your child, then you come back six hours later and somebody's done the work for you. But yeah, it's about what I expected.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, you know, I feel like, and you know, at this point, most of my contact with human beings is email and Twitter. I feel like everybody kind of is divided into one of two groups. In group A, you have these people who are, you know, they're saying, at least I have time to read in quarantine. And, you know, by the way, I'm accepting recommendations for TV shows to binge watch. The second group of which I'm a part, we're homeschooling our kids. There is zero time. So yeah, to be honest, my day is pretty much consumed with hanging out with my four-year-old and trying to create as good and as structured a day as I can for her. And then working kind of frantically, you know, she naps for an hour or so and I can maybe get a couple hours of childcare in the afternoon. And then after she goes to bed. So every day is just this crazy juggling”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My impression, and you know, the problem is, we don't see people anymore, but yeah, my overall impression is they've been more cooperative. Definitely in the literary community, I've seen a lot of people really trying to support their independent bookstores, which Always been a thing, but you know, I think there's been a greater awareness that look if you don't buy your books from your independent bookstore. And, you know, by the way, they do all sell online mostly, then that store might not be there when all of this ends. So, you know, I see people pulling together like that to try to support the businesses they love. That's been a major one. Yeah, I wish I could see people and bring back a report from like actual humanity. That is my impression. There's been more cooperation.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human beings. Yeah. The biggest surprise for me, I guess, I did do a bit of research into pandemics when I was writing Station 11, but something I never really thought about was the dread of waiting for a pandemic to arrive. And that's just, yeah, that was been really unexpected to me that we were in this long period over the last three weeks or so when intellectually we all knew it was coming, but somehow at the same time didn't really feel real. So we didn't, you know, we weren't really stocking up on Lysol wipes, like the things that you want to have. That atmosphere of anticipatory dread was something that I hadn't really considered or expected.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you would just assume that everybody flew, you know, you'd be like, well, you know, something everybody did in that lost world was getting an airplane on a regular basis. And, you know, there are 5,000 boarding passes here in this museum. I think it's actually a fairly small percentage of the population that flies regularly. Yeah, that might be the biggest thing.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It comes to my personality. Sometimes the world can seem kind of not quite unreal, but somehow improbable. Or you can look around at your life. Speaking for myself, I can look around at my life and think this seems implausible. I don't think it's quite as severe as any kind of disassociation syndrome. But, you know, it is this kind of idea that plays at the back of my mind sometimes. So I think that absolutely comes out of my fiction.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do yeah. I'm fascinated in the what if. You know, you went right instead of left in the intersection, how would everything be different if you'd made that choice?”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then in the glass hotel, I tried to plant that seed again with that chapter where Vincent is kind of wandering down the street, sort of thinking to herself, this own kind of game that she plays, imagining a world where, for example, that terrifying new flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn't been quite so swiftly contained. So I know that a certain number of readers will read the Glass Hotel waiting for the flu pandemic to arrive, but I see them as kind of operating in parallel realities.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parallel universes. So, you know, all of my novels are standalone works, but sometimes I'll have a character who I just really want to use again. And station 11, I really liked Miranda and I really liked Clark and I really liked Leon, even though by the final draft of that book, he was basically a cameo character. So I wanted to reuse at least a couple of those people, but that's a little tricky when you're about to kill off the entire population with a flu. So I tried to sort of cover my tracks in station 11. with this chapter toward the end of the book and one of the post apocalyptic sections where two characters I think it's Kirsten in August are talking about this they're playing this game they play sometimes where they sort of trade alternate universe ideas you know an alternate universe where I didn't lose all my teeth or an alternate universe where the Georgia flu never happened and civilization moved on”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, you could definitely make that argument. On the other hand, most people in the Glass Hotel are not actually horrible. And something I was really interested in was thinking about the permeability of our moral borders, I guess you could say. It seems to me that probably most of us are corruptible and that you probably don't have to be an entirely horrible person to find yourself participating in a Ponzi scheme, even though that is a horrible thing to do. Yeah, that kind of moral slide was interesting to me. So, you know, you could say that the people behave worse in the Glass Hotel than Station 11, but at the same time, they're not awful people.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really at all. You know, I'm not from a religious household, so I didn't grow up with that story. And I guess it doesn't grab my imagination in a way that some other post apocalyptic stories do. The one that really grabs my imagination is a 1960 novel called The Canticle for Leboweds by Walter Miller, which is one of my favorite books. I read that when I was about 15, and it kind of blew my mind. It's a very different apocalypse than Station 11, but I think of it as the book that made me first think about what a post-apocalyptic world might look like.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had this conversation with another post apocalyptic novelist, you know, would everybody stop walking? Like, why is everybody wandering endlessly in post-apocalyptic? It's a fair question. You know, I think that in the same way that in our modern, hopefully still pre-apocalyptic world, some people are content to live their entire lives in their hometowns, while others get out really as soon as they possibly can. And that was me. I think some people can live quite happily in a very small, probably, inevitably insular community, you know, on your post-apocalyptic wasteland. Whereas others, it would be like if I have to look at these same 300 people in the same place, you know, for one more day, I'm going to go crazy. So I think those are the people who would start wandering.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not even the area anymore. You know, this has become clear to us in New York City in the last couple of days. It's the amount of equipment. So the problem in New York with COVID-19, it's not that there are too many of us, it's that there aren't enough ventilators. So yeah, I see it as more an equipment problem than a population density issue.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anywhere away from other people with enough supplies to be self sufficient. So New York City is the worst case scenario. But yeah, if you had some kind of secluded place far away from other people where you could feed yourself and have enough water, that would absolutely be the best scenario.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can fish exactly fresh water, I guess, would eventually become an issue. But if you have the equipment for desalinization, then you'd be okay for a while. Yeah, I think your best bet would be to stay on board until the pandemic burned itself out.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, definitely. The project to Station 11 was I wanted to set a novel and a post technological world because I thought it might be interesting to think about and write about the modern world by contemplating its absence, you know, in the same way that you can talk about a person by delivering a eulogy. So yeah, it can absolutely be read as a love letter to electricity, plane travel, antibiotics, insulin, like all of the trappings of civilization that we tend to take for granted.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brick by trying to remember the name of the writer director. She just put out knives out. Ryan Johnson. Yeah, that was an amazing”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm sorry as a reader. Yes. Yeah, that is underrated. You should absolutely toss books you don't like. You know, I meet people sometimes that have these hard and fast rules. You know, I'll never put down a book before page 150 or I have to finish every book I start. And I just think, you know, life is pretty short. Like I don't want to spend a lot of time reading work that doesn't interest me. So yeah, that is underrated. You should put down a book if you don't like it.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underrated. That's never happened to me, which is something I'm really grateful for. But I have friends who's quote unquote first novel was actually their fourth or fifth book. And writers tend to see that as kind of an awful thing. Like, you know, God, I've wasted two years of my life writing this novel and now it lives in a drawer. But that was how you were learning how to write a novel. So, you know, I would see that as a valuable experience.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same problem. I can't call her underrated because she's famous and she filled stadiums in her lifetime with poetry readings, which is a fairly spectacular achievement. Yeah, so she's not overrated. She's incredible. Can you call somebody underrated if they're...”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated. You can write a book that is a profound and fascinating, I should know, I'm not going to say fascinating, a profound exploration of boredom and the sort of vacuity of entertainment culture. That doesn't mean it's not a boring book. I just found infinite jest to be really overrated. But that being said, I loved the Pale King, even though he never finished that novel. So it's hard for me to really categorize an entire body of work in that way. If we were going with his most famous book, then I guess I would say overrated. But I would say that the Pale King was underrated. You know, that was a chaotic book in fragments that he didn't get a chance to finish. But there was great stuff there.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same problem. I'm struggling with this because I love them. But it's not like they're underrated. Everybody loves them. I wish they were a happy medium, but I guess I go with underrated because I'm not going to call that work of genius overrated.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Under Just think she's a genius. And yeah, I don't think that I feel like somehow her work should be more appreciated than it is. Like I know it is, but like I'm not going to call her overrated because I think she's good.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The one that sticks with me is prelude to foundation, but I read him so long ago. I feel like I'm no longer qualified to.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's become, I think, more subtle, you know, or maybe that's just what I was reading as a teenager. My memory of the sci-fi I read as a teenager was a lot of Isaac Asimov, a lot of space stations and androids and kind of like space opera type stuff. Whereas now it seems to me that recent sci-fi books I've read like a great one in the last decade or so was how to live safely in a science fictional universe by Charles Yu, who's writing I really admire. And you know, that was just such a subtle exploration of kind of humanity in the context of this very surreal sort of sci-fi novel. So yeah, but I don't know if the form has changed or if I'm just reading Better Sci-Fi now that I was as a teenager.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like this secret city. It's weird. You know, if you grow up in Canada, Toronto is the city. But this goes back to the population thing I alluded to earlier. There are just not that many Canadians relative to Americans. So for us, it's a major city. And I think a lot of Canadian novels are set there. But those novels don't necessarily even find American publishers. Yeah, it's weird living in the States thinking about Toronto. It's like this secret metropolis of 2.8 million people right on the other side of the border. And Americans never think about it.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Night manager. It's not super recent, it was a few years ago. But yeah, limited series of my favorite John Lacarai novel. It was adapted by Susanna Beer. And yeah, it was something like six episodes. It departed wildly from the book, but I felt like it worked. It just had a lot of style, great writing, fantastic acting, really high stakes. So yeah, if I had to pick one, I might be that.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably the same. Yeah, I can't read at night. I'll fall asleep. Now, the competitor for the novel at All Seriousness is probably Netflix too. The quality of TV is so high now that there's a great argument to be made that you're watching, you know, that you're experiencing an equally complex and deep and artistic narrative through the medium of your laptop, you know, as you are in the page. Yeah, I would say those two are in competition.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if it's competition for the internet, or I was going to say a competition for TV, but of course, that's kind of the same thing sometimes. I see novels being much more fragmented, it seems to me, in the last few years, where you have really short chapters, really kind of strong visuals, where you read the little fragment of text and you feel like you can see it. And to me, that seems like a clear influence from television. And I don't think that's a bad thing at all. You know, there have been some pretty amazing TV shows the last few years. You could argue that it's a bad thing that it implies that our attention spans might be shorter. But I don't know if they are, or if it's just, you know, we just become used to this kind of more staccato rhythm to novels. I kind of like those books, to be honest.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but doesn't that make you feel manipulated when you see a clever cover and calls out to you? You're like, that book wants me to believe that I'm smart enough to be attracted to that book. And it's like the circular thing that happens. Yeah, sometimes, you know what, even beautiful and interesting. I feel like they're almost the wrong words. It's more like, is it striking? Like, does it grab your attention? And yeah, sometimes my attention's grabbed by sheer beauty, but sometimes the opposite. You know, I love black and white covers or books where it's just a white cover with black text. The simplicity of that is striking to me.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty badly. There are a lot of seriously mediocre books with gorgeous covers because there's a lot of talent in the art departments. Yeah, you know what? I have picked up books based on the cover, but that's got to be backed up in some way. You know, sometimes you see a gorgeous cover and then you turn it over and it's like, wow, this looks like something that would hold zero interest for me and it goes back down.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, I kind of appreciate the guidance just because, as a matter of personal preference, I prefer novels to short story collections. So if it's in fiction, I just kind of want to know what I'm getting into. Yeah, it'll either say a novel or it'll say stories. And to be clear, I do sometimes read short stories. But yeah, I want to know what it is.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure. It seems intuitive to me that it might, kind of for the opposite of Franz Kafka's formulation. Like there's a certain desire for escapism just at the moment. Yeah, it's intuitive to me that it would, but I'll be curious to see what the numbers look like in a year.”
2020-04-08 · Conversations with Tyler · Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source