In 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 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’t go forward due to the upheaval at HBO and parent company Warner Brothers, was starting to see setbacks. “Nobody’s deal closed in time, so they pushed our writer’s room back by two months,” Mandel…
