Overview
- In a recent Esquire interview Mandel described Exit Party as a near‑future novel set in 2031 Los Angeles that follows protagonist Ari Waker as survivors navigate life after a U.S. civil war.
- Mandel says she wrote the book to probe what resilience and personal identity look like after the collapse of a country and to examine how people hold on to their humanity in extreme conditions.
- She is a plaintiff in a lawsuit alleging Anthropic trained a large language model on five of her novels without permission, a claim that targets how generative AI companies gather copyrighted texts for model training.
- Mandel told Esquire she does not believe AI will soon produce truly original, emotionally resonant novels and pointed to a New York Public Library reading event she saw as evidence that young readers still seek human‑authored books.
- Her 2014 breakthrough with Station Eleven, which won awards and became an HBO series, gives weight to her public stance and places her case within a wider wave of authors pressing courts to limit how tech firms use literary work.