Emily St. John Mandel on SEA OF TRANQUILITY

04/05/22 • 43 min

1 Listener

“I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe...”

How many times have you re-read Emily St. John Mandel’s genre-blending novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel? Emily joins us on the show to talk about her latest novel Sea of Tranquility — our April 2022 Barnes & Noble Book Club pick — along with what she loves most about writing, breaking the rules of time + space, how character development makes an imaginary world real, the writers and books who inspire her, and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc.

Featured Books:

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Executioner’s Song by Normal Mailer

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays).

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

Featured Books:

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

The Executioner’s Song by Normal Mailer

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays).

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

Previous Episode

Viet Thanh Nguyen on THE COMMITTED

“...Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of humor that you're talking about not a light-hearted sense of humor, but a very cynical and dark sense of humor, a sense of the absurd.” Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed (now out in paperback), among other books, joins us on the show to riff on the return of his unnamed narrator, why he followed his prize-winning spy thriller with a crime novel set in 1980s Paris, how his novels are in conversation with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the American canon, his literary inspirations and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:

Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee

American Spy by Lauren Wilkerson

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré

The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us her for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays.)

A full transcript of the show is available here.

Next Episode

Jennifer Egan on THE CANDY HOUSE

"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I mean, fiction is about going inside other people's minds and consciousnesses and looking through their eyes and living their lives in a way and that's all about emotions.” Jennifer Egan challenged the way many of us thought about how (but not why) we tell stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad—which went on to win the Pulitzer. She joins us on our 100th episode of the show to talk about her latest, The Candy House, which she describes as a “sibling novel” to Goon Squad, along with truth and time and space and memory and nostalgia, the interplay between tech and story (including finding poetry in elliptical, 140-character tweets), finding inspiration in slightly unexpected places like baseball and Dungeons + Dragons, returning to characters she never really left (including the peripheral ones), and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:

The Candy House by Jennifer Egan

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Three Pigs by David Weisner

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, introduction by Jennifer Egan

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

A complete transcript of this episode is available here.