Join us for a conversation between Emily St. John Mandel and Professors Alex Shakar and Amy Hassinger from the University of Illinois Creative Writing Program.
Emily St. John Mandel is the author of five novels, most recently The Glass Hotel (2020) which explores the interlocking stories of the living and the dead; parallel lives and the counterlife; the ordinary and the extraordinary, all set against two seemingly unrelated incidents: the collapse of an international Ponzi scheme and the disappearance of a woman at sea. Her previous novel Station Eleven (2014) takes place in the Great Lakes region and follows the intertwined narratives of a nomadic group of actors and musicians, a film star and a sinister figure known as The Prophet in the years before and after a global pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population. Winner of the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, Toronto Book Award and the Morning News Tournament of Books, finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner award, and currently being adapted into an HBO miniseries, Station Eleven is above all a meditation on the importance of art and humanity in the wake of civilization’s collapse.
Hosted by: Center for Advanced Study, Center for Writing Studies, The Robert J. Carr Visiting Author Series
