Register now for the Library’s final Author Talk of 2021-2022!
Join us on Thursday, June 16 at 5:30 p.m. as University Librarian Erik Mitchell is in virtual conversation with bestselling author Emily St. John Mandel. This event is open to the public and a donation of any size to the Library is strongly encouraged.
Mandel is the author of six novels, most recently “Sea of Tranquility.” Her novel “The Glass Hotel” was selected by former President Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2020. Mandel’s fourth novel, ”Station Eleven,” won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, among other honors, and has been translated into 36 languages. “Station Eleven” also aired as a limited series on HBO Max.
In her work, ideas of mutable and transformed identities preoccupy Mandel’s writing and features prominently in her novels. Characters are built up and made undone by shifting socioeconomic statuses, distortions or failures of memory, and the transgression of boundaries both physical and metaphorical. Her speculative fiction seizes readers’ imaginations across the globe as circumstances in her novel “Station Eleven” eerily resemble the reality of an ensuing pandemic we currently find ourselves in. Far from considering herself or her work as prophetic in any sense, Mandel writes as someone interested in non-linear forms of storytelling often meditating on the impacts of “insufferable work” versus the life-giving force of pursuing art as work. Performance — which takes on multiple meanings in her work — seems to be the key mode her characters choose to construct their identities during moments of instability, exercising a control they lack in the different, disjointed realities they occupy.
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Contact:
UC San Diego Library
ucsdlibrary@ucsd.edu
Registration:
http://lib.ucsd.edu/mandel