By Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Graywolf Press (USA), House of Anansi (Canada), 2023.

A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.

Of course, each thing has its own sides to every story.

In a dark and crooked lane in an unnamed city where it never ceases to snow, a small white box falls from a coat pocket. It is made of paper strips woven tightly together; there is no apparent way to open it without destroying it. What compels a passing witness to this event, a self-described anthrophobe not inclined to engage with other people, to pick up the box and chase after the stranger who dropped it?

The Box follows a rectangular cuboid as it changes hands in a collapsing metropolis, causing confluences, conflicts, rifts, and disasters. Different narrators, each with a distinctive voice, give accounts of decisive moments in the box’s life. From the anthrophobe to a newly hired curator of a renowned art collection to a couple who own an antiquarian bookshop to a hotel bartender hiding from a terrible past, the storytellers repeat rumors and rely on faulty memories, grasping at a thing that continually escapes them. Haunting their secondhand recollections is one mysterious woman who, convinced of the box’s good or evil powers, pursues it with deadly desperation.

A mesmerizing, intricately constructed puzzle of a novel, The Box challenges our understanding of subjects and objects, of cause and effect. Is it only humans who have agency? What is or isn’t animate? What do we value and what do we discard?

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her novels include The Box (Graywolf, House of Anansi), a Bustle Best Books selection, and Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal), a Foreword INDIES literary-fiction finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee. She’s also the author of Listen, We All Bleed (New Rivers), a PEN/Galbraith-nominated essay collection and ASLE Book Award finalist, and Awabi, a duet of short stories, winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. Her work appears in Arcturus, Black Warrior Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Litro, and Necessary Fiction and has won recognition in the Best of the Net and Aeon Award competitions.

Essays and Excerpts 

“The Box: Experiments and Inspirations,” Women Writers

“Of Snow and White Paper,” an excerpt, Adroit

“10 De-Anthropocentric Dystopian Novels in Translation,” Electric Literature

“Changeling,” an excerpt, Cardiff Review

“Estranging English,” Literary Hub

Praise for The Box

The Box is an extraordinary novel, gamesome and philosophical. Not since Borges have I experienced fiction as a perfect maze or puzzle, endlessly pleasing. The reader enters it, fascinated, just as s/he goes out into the snow, which is always falling. Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a writer to watch.

— Amina Cain, author of A Horse at Night and Indelicacy

Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s bold, singular, and brilliant novel is so strange, so enigmatic, it’s nearly impossible to describe. In an unnamed city with unending snow, a tiny box falls from a stranger’s pocket. From there the reader is bestowed with an array of different narrators and situations: art galleries, pawnshops, antiquarian bookshops. By turns funny and profound, The Box is a feat of language and storytelling and, in the end, a revelation.

—Mark Haber, author of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss and Reinhardt’s Garden

If one of César Aira’s sly, sophisticated fictions took a detour through Jane Bennett’s theory of vibrant matter, the result might look something like The Box. At once a detective story, a meditation on art in the Anthropocene, and a speculative encounter with the liveliness of things, Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s startling novel is literature for our times.

—Sofia Samatar, author of The White Mosque and Tender

Wong’s limpid, precise prose has a nineteenth century vibe, while her focus, an inanimate object, could not be more contemporary. Riveting and elegant, The Box brings to mind Kazuo Ishiguro at his most enigmatic.

—Daisy Rockwell, author of Taste, translator of Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree