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February 27, 2013
Volume 1 Brooklyn Interviews Emily St. John Mandel
In an article entitled Notes on Identity, Location, and the Undefinable: A Between Books Interview With Emily St. John Mandel, Tobias Carroll of Volume 1 Brooklyn, interviews Emily St. John Mandel. Volume 1 Brooklyn is an organization that “engages and connects the literary-minded from Brooklyn and beyond. Vol. 1 Brooklyn features short and long form content on our website and produces a number of free cultural events to bridge the gaps between various forms of culture and art.”
Below is the first question of the interview which was conducted by email over a period of a few weeks:
Reading your novels in order, I feel as though they’ve become more and more rooted in a specific timeframe, with The Lola Quartet in particular situated in a particular and contemporary moment. Has the writing that you’ve done since then been more general or more specific in its time and place?
That’s an interesting observation. I think you’re right about these books becoming successively more rooted in a particular time… the first novel could have taken place just about any time between now and about 1998 or whenever it was that people started using cellphones, the second novel is set sometime between now and 2006 (there’s a scene in the new 7 World Trade Center tower, which was completed that year), but The Lola Quartet required a very specific timeframe. I knew that I wanted to write about the economic collapse, which automatically places the narrative in the months following the demise of Lehman Brothers. The book I’m working on now is less specific to a particular time, although there are certain technology markers, like iPhones for instance, that place the novel somewhere in the general vicinity of the present day. I think I prefer to keep the timeframe somewhat vague, unless the plot requires that the book be set in a specific moment.
Emily St. John Mandel has three novels published by Unbridled Books, Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet.
To read the entire interview on the Volume 1 Brooklyn website, Click Here
Posted in: New Books, Our Catalog, News/Press, | Keywords: emily st. john mandel, last night in montreal, noir fiction, the lola quartet, the singer's gun, volume 1 brooklyn
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