Emily St. John Mandel
Overture Center-Capitol Theater 201 State St., Madison, Wisconsin 53703
Laura Barisonzi
A close-up of Emily St. John Mandel.
Emily St. John Mandel
Exit Party, Emily St. John Mandel’s hot-off-the-presses novel, follows in the footsteps of her eerie 2014 hit, Station Eleven, about a pandemic. In this dystopian tale, by 2031 the United States has disunited into a bunch of warring republics ruled by militias. Or, perhaps it’s a tightly controlled surveillance state. Mandel begins with Ari, a marginally employed vagabond who starts to notice some very weird coincidences. Seems there’s a dual reality in place and the dividing line between the two has been breached. Mandel is a deft storyteller whose prose is efficient, capable and never gets in the way of the narrative. She will be in conversation with writer and UW-Madison professor Dantiel Moniz at this Wisconsin Book Festival event.
media release: Please note this event will be held in the Capitol Theater at the Overture Center. It's free and open to the public on a first-come, first-served basis. Seating is by general admission. Doors open at 6 p.m.
Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.
As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change.
In conversation with Dantiel Moniz.
