{"id":858187,"date":"2026-09-23T20:58:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/858187\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T20:58:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T20:58:09","slug":"emily-st-john-mandel-on-new-book-shelved-glass-hotel-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/858187\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily St. John Mandel on New Book, Shelved ‘Glass Hotel’ Adaptation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn the spring of 2022 Emily St. John Mandel found herself in Los Angeles with a lot of time on her hands. The Brooklyn-based author, who first found literary fame after her 2014 pandemic novel Station Eleven<\/a> became a bestseller and a National Book Award finalist and then again when the book became a cult-favorite HBO limited series, had come to town to work on an adaptation of her 2020 tome The Glass Hotel. The series, which ultimately didn\u2019t go forward due to the upheaval at HBO and parent company Warner Brothers, was starting to see setbacks. \u201cNobody\u2019s deal closed in time, so they pushed our writer\u2019s room back by two months,\u201d Mandel explains to The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cBut I\u2019d booked an Airbnb, and I\u2019d set up a complicated schedule of childcare for my daughter, so I knew I had to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMandel started hammering out the pilot with showrunner Patrick Somerville (the two currently have permission to sell the scripts should another network show interest) but spent most of her days thinking about what her next novel might be. At the time, she had two fascinations: The current political environment, with the threat of another Trump presidency looming, and the character Ari, who was the villain of her second novel The Singer\u2019s Gun. \u201cShe was in prison, and I\u2019d never had a narrative way to get her out,\u201d says the author, who is known for repeated use of characters throughout different books<\/a>. \u201cBut at this point I figured so much time has passed and I could set this book a bit into the future. So I took this person, who\u2019s been dropped out of time for 18 years, and put her into a fractured, chaotic, hopeful world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat ultimately became Exit Party<\/a>, a speculative story about a dystopian not-so-distant future in which the government of the United States has collapsed and Los Angeles has become something of a refugee camp from the latent civil war. The novel opens as Ari attends a party celebrating the recent lifting of a citywide curfew and discovers a portal to an alternate world where L.A. has become a surveillance state.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a conversation with THR, the author and screenwriter discusses what to make of her latest work, and gives an update on her latest adaptations.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLaura Barisonzi<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m not sure if you\u2019ve seen Civil War, but when that movie came out audiences had a lot of questions about how he imagined the events and military actions that preceded the version of the country we see in the film. I imagine there will be similar discourse with Exit Party. <\/p>\n

\n\tI did, and I do think it\u2019s very easy to imagine the scenarios. For example, suppose that Mike Johnson were to refuse to seat the Democrats after the midterms. But for me, I almost didn\u2019t care [what happened] because I was more interested in the aftermath than I was in how the breakup of the country happened. My editors are mixed on that, which is why there\u2019s a paragraph on the first page that\u2019s like, \u2018the United States had come apart following a coup d\u2019etat\u2018. I put that in under slight duress. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhen you write a very topical novel like this, do you think about what the inevitable press tour will be like, and what sorts of questions you\u2019ll be answering for the next year of your life?<\/p>\n

\n\tI dreaded that a little bit. I published Station Eleven in 2014, and at the time it was like wow, what a crazy fantastical scenario. Then the book took on a much greater weight after the pandemic, and I went on the road again doing paid conversations and lectures as a side gig, and people wanted to talk to me about what happened to them during Covid. It can feel like something I\u2019m not qualified to take on. I listen and I absorb. My wife made the point about this book that I\u2019m going to be absorbing everybody\u2019s political anxieties for the next year. But look, I\u2019m here for it, and I feel fortunate that the book is finding enough audience to do that. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhat have you observed about the way book publishing is changing, especially as you get more successful?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat feels different with this book is how fractured the media environment is. I\u2019m talking to a lot of mainstream journalists but also people with Substacks who have huge followings. There\u2019s an incredible marketing team at Knopf, but I\u2019m also on Instagram working very hard. I\u2019m constantly taking screenshots of accounts with a lot of followers and asking the team to get them a galley. I saw that Justin Tranter said something lovely about my work, so I DM\u2019ed him asking if he wanted a book, and now he\u2019s saying nice things about Exit Party. The hustle has never let up. <\/p>\n

\n\tYou had a big success with the Station Eleven series, does that get you any more clout or power in the publishing world?<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t know that it did. I think it increased the size of my audience, and it helped with the TV writing side of my career and trying to adapt my own work. I wasn\u2019t involved in the adaptation, but it did serve as proof of concept that my weird books can work on TV. <\/p>\n

\n\tAt the time, did you have a desire to be involved in the adaptation?<\/p>\n

\n\tI had a phone call with Patrick Somerville in 2017, I think he was on the set of Maniac. He\u2019d just been able to bring Station Eleven over to Paramount and he offered me a place in the writer\u2019s room. At the time I was like, \u201cGo do your thing, I\u2019m going to write The Glass Hotel.\u201c But then the pandemic was such an isolating experience and I wanted to collaborate with people instead of working alone in a room. I got into television for the collaboration and the health insurance.<\/p>\n

\n\tAre you still trying to adapt any of your other work?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, I was on Assassin\u2019s Creed all of last year, and it was really fun. I\u2019m writing a script for Last Night in Montreal with Semi Chellas [Mad Men], so I\u2019m hoping that\u2019ll happen. I was paired with Semi for a different iteration of The Glass Hotel, which obviously didn\u2019t sell, but she\u2019s so fun to work and hang out with, so writing this was just how I hung out with my friend on Zoom. Natalie Leite, who was on The Handmaid\u2019s Tale, just came on board as a director. And we have an actor attached, but I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019m supposed to say that. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhat is the experience of casting like when it\u2019s for one of your own books?<\/p>\n

\n\tWell, sometimes you do bump into the dehumanizing side of Hollywood and of being an actor. Or, I should say, of being an actress. I\u2019ve been in those casting meetings where we\u2019ll be talking about someone and they\u2019ll ask, \u201cIs she too old?\u201c And she\u2019s 27. So I\u2019m often the person in the room arguing for the actress to be older than I had her in the book.<\/p>\n

\n\tWill we be getting an Exit Party adaptation?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m working on the pilot script. I sold it to Laika Studios. I\u2019m into second round studio notes. I also wrote a pilot script for The Lola Quartet, my third novel, which is kind of a Florida noir thing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the spring of 2022 Emily St. John Mandel found herself in Los Angeles with a lot of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,362348],"class_list":["post-858187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-books","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-station-eleven"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}