Emily St. John Mandel: Exit Party
Emily St. John Mandel discusses her seventh novel Exit Party — from the author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, a new work launching September 2026.
Why we picked this
Mandel is one of the few novelists writing literary fiction that also functions as genuine speculative work — *Exit Party* arrives on the heels of two novels that were each better than the last.
Emily St. John Mandel writes the kind of fiction that defies easy categorization: literary in its attention to character and language, speculative in its structural ambitions, and accessible in a way that earned her readers who don’t normally read either. Station Eleven imagined civilization’s collapse and recovery. Sea of Tranquility folded time in on itself across centuries. The Glass Hotel made a financial fraud into a ghost story.
Exit Party is her seventh novel, launching in September 2026, and this City Arts evening brings her to San Francisco at the moment of publication — early enough that the conversation will still be discovering what the book is, which tends to produce better literary discussions than retrospective appreciation.
For readers who have followed her trajectory and for those coming to the work for the first time.