Station Eleven

The anticipation doesn't just build, it ferments.

Readers have had four whole years to dissect her previous novels, you know, to map out the connections and to theorize about where the invisible architecture will lead next.

And four years of theorizing means the stakes for this new release are just incredibly high.

So for this deep dive, we are setting some strict ground rules right up front.

We're hunting for hidden literary Easter eggs.

We're analyzing the mechanics of these wild parallel timelines.

And most importantly, we're exploring the profound human connections that tie all these supposedly standalone novels into a secret unified universe.

Which requires a completely different mode of engagement from the reader.

This was just greatness.

Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, has a new book out.

She was in conversation with Daniel Handler, who wrote all the Lemony Snicket books.

He's a local.

It is in her whole world.

All of her books have a couple of characters that cross over, but you don't have to have read them in any order at all or have read anything to get full enjoyment out of them.

This one does seem to be, she definitely seems to be leaning more into the sci-fi since, uh, the, uh, Station Eleven and her previous book.

So I have not read this one yet [laughs] because it just came out last week.

You don't even see The Glass Hotel.

Maybe it's just see-through, but we got an island here, and it says The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, bestselling author of Station Eleven.

Again, this is my, one of my favorite books of hers.

She had written Station Eleven, which was the first book I read of hers.

She wrote a kind of a sequel to this called The Sea of Tranquility, and she's got a new one out right now called Exit Party that came out two weeks ago that is an absolute banger.

Uh, might be one of m- might, might have surpassed The Glass Hotel for my favorite, uh, in the Mandel-verse, as, if you will.

"Rank the Emily St. John Mandel books.

I think it's Sea of Tranquility and Singer's Gun at the top for me." You know, this is a tough one for me now.

I really hope not.

But she wrote Station Eleven before the pandemic, and then the pandemic happens.

So she has some prescience.

I don't know if it's a combination of empathy and storytelling, but she has her finger on the pulse of our collective future.

Her other novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama's list, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages.

And Station Eleven, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other honors.

It's been translated into 37 languages and aired as a limited series on HBO Max.

She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

I'm a super fan.

Thank you.

I've read Station Eleven so many times.

I've taught it.

Our guest today is Emily St. John Mandel, a writer whose work experiments with literary noir, speculative fiction, and horror.

Her best-selling books include The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, and her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven was adapted into a limited series for HBO.

On September 18th, 2026, on the occasion of her newest novel, Exit Party, Mandel came to the Sidney Goldstein Theater to talk to Daniel Hamler, the author of numerous books for all ages, sometimes under the pen name Lemony Snicket.

Join us now for a conversation with Emily St. John Mandel.

Give it up!

much.

Well, thank you.

I was handed your first novel in a Vancouver bookstore.

What carries it is the characters.

And that's the same thing with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and more modern sci-fi Station Eleven.

Station Eleven has an absolutely terrible plot, if it has one at all, but it has fantastic characters and that carries the story through.

So, but yeah, my top three, let me go back over on Fahrenheit 451.

A Prayer for Onmini, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.