Men's Lifestyle September 9, 2026 0 Comments

What Emily St. John Mandel Sees Beyond America’s Fall Will Shock Your Survival Instincts—Are You Ready?

Ever catch yourself wondering about the roads not taken? Emily St. John Mandel sure has — and she’s been weaving those “ghost lives” and parallel universes into stories that stick with you long after the last page. With six novels under her belt and a resume that includes Barack Obama’s favorite reads list (twice!), Mandel isn’t just any author; she’s a powerhouse who pivots from dancing dreams to dystopian futures. Remember her breakout, Station Eleven? An award-winning, plague-haunted saga that Netflix fans might know from the HBO series. Now, Mandel is tackling something eerily close to home — a fractured America post-civil war, framed in her latest, Exit Party. It’s a sobering, sometimes bittersweet look at resilience and humanity when the world as we know it unravels. So, what keeps her hopeful amid the chaos? And why does she believe no AI, fancy as it may get, can quite capture the raw, emotional punch of her stories? Stick around, ‘cause this isn’t your typical author spotlight. It’s a 3-minute mind jog through Mandel’s vivid imaginings and sharp insights on today’s fractured reality. LEARN MORE

3 min read

Even with six successful novels under her belt, Emily St. John Mandel is still fascinated by the lives left unlived. The author has been included in Barack Obama’s annual list of favorite books twice. Plus, her 2014 novel Station Eleven won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, has been translated into 33 languages, and was adapted into an HBO series. Station Eleven gripped readers with its prescient vision about a plague-ridden future, and now, her new novel Exit Party reckons the aftermath of a new American civil war that feels all too plausible. In a new episode of Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” interview series, editor-in-chief Michael Sebastian asks Mandel about her outlook on the future.

Mandel’s life changed dramatically after the debut of her fourth novel, Station Eleven. She described the shift as “profound,” and found herself with the privilege of focusing on her work instead of having to worry about financial problems. “Nothing in [my early life] that suggested a career as a novelist in New York City,” Mandel tells Sebastian. “I don’t have a high school diploma. It sometimes feels like my current life is much less plausible than other lives I could have lived—lives where I stayed in Canada and didn’t have this kind of success and kept dancing, which was my training instead of writing. That’s partly why I’m so drawn to this idea of ghost lives or ghost shadows of parallel universes.”

Now 13% Off

It’s easy to understand why a writer would think about an alternate reality, when most people seem to be living in their own version of reality these days. Mandel grapples with this tension in Exit Party, her dystopian futuristic novel, in a way that feels uncomfortably close to the present. The novel is set in the year 2031 in Los Angeles and follows Ari Waker in a daunting quest of survival following the fall of America after a civil war. “It’s hard not to be pessimistic and somewhat anxious about the political situation we find ourselves in in this country—the extreme division,” Mandel says. “I wanted to write a book about the aftermath of the worst-case scenario. What does resilience mean in a time like this? Who are you going to be at the end of a country?”

Mandel handles all of these heavy philosophical questions as well as the scientific ones in Exit Party. The novel deals with an alternate America, where the country has collapsed and the survivors try to piece together the fragments that remain. But Mandel sees the novel as a hopeful one. “It was more about examining how we respond as people,” Mandel says. “How we hold on to our humanity or don’t in these really extreme situations, the aftermath of these extreme situations.”

Even though her novels are often dark and complicated, Mandel finds hope in many unexpected places. She has faith that people still love to read for pleasure. On a recent walk through midtown Manhattan, Mandel and her wife stumbled up on a reading party hosted by the New York Public Library. “There were all of these people reading on blankets in the lawn,” Mandel says. “A lot of the people were young… that gave me a lot of hope for reading. I think that there’s something about reading books that I think touches upon a longing for reality that we have in the age of AI.”

In the new age of exponential growth for AI, Mandel doesn’t believe that AI will write any emotionally resonant work anytime soon. Mandel is part of a lawsuit against AI developer Anthropic, alleging that the large language model was trained on five of her novels. “Even if an AI novel could get on The New York Times bestseller list, even if it were good, like in some future, more advanced version of the AI chatbots, by definition, I don’t think it could break new ground,” Mandel says.

Mandel isn’t giving up, and neither are her characters in Exit Party, which absolutely breaks new literary ground. You can listen to Mandel’s full “What I’ve Learned” interview below.