Emily St. John Mandel

I do almost all of my work in a small off-white room with a wooden floor and soft lighting. In the interests of full disclosure, it’s usually considerably messier than what you see in the pictures, and I’ve since acquired a more comfortable desk chair.

The desk is very small. It usually has a cat on it. I’m planning on upgrading to a bigger desk the next time someone sends me a large check. A disappointingly large portion of the window is blocked by the air conditioner; I tried to do without for a while, but the New York summer heat turns the room into a sauna. The air conditioner ruined the Brooklyn-rooftops view, but when I’m sitting at the desk I can still see the sky, and also the cellphone tower on top of the pizzeria on the corner.

There’s a sewing machine on top of a smaller bookcase, a couple of bags of fabric/unfinished sewing projects, a poster for the original French version of La Femme Nikita, an Inuit doll that a family friend brought back from the Northwest Territories in the 1960s.

There’s a wildly disorganized bookcase, filled mostly with poetry. The bookcase has a small green metal car parked by the Last Night in Montreal author copies. The car’s among my most treasured possessions: it was a gift from my parents when I was three, on the day my brother was born.

The walls are all covered with photographs I’ve taken over the past decade or so: street scenes from here and there, closeups of things I found beautiful, a classically-trained singer who dressed up like an angel and sang an aria in the subway on a day when I happened to have exactly the right film for low lighting.

Emily St. John Mandel is the author of two novels, Last Night in Montreal and The Singer’s Gun. She’s revising a third. She spends too much time on the subway. You can follow her on Twitter at @EmilyMandel.