About
Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her novel DRAFTS OF A SUICIDE NOTE was a Foreword INDIES finalist and PEN Open Book Award nominee. LISTEN, WE ALL BLEED, her first essay collection, was an ASLE Book Award finalist, an EcoLit Best Environmental Book of 2021, and a PEN/Galbraith nominee. Her fiction chapbook AWABI won the Digging Press Chapbook Series Award and is now in its second edition.
THE BOX, her next novel, will be published by Graywolf Press in September 2023.
Featured Work
The Box
A stylistically dazzling novel about things, people, and the forces and seams between them.
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 an impenetrable rectangle 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?
Other Works
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Listen, we all bleed.
2021
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Artificial Wilderness
2020
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Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space
2020
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Drafts of a Suicide Note
2019
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Awabi
2019
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist, ALSE Book Award, 2022 - Listen, we all bleed
- Finalist, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Finalist (Fiction: General), American Book Fest's Best Book Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Finalist, Eyelands Book Award, 2019 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Winner, Selcouth Station Press Environmental Chapbook Competition, 2019 - Artificial Wilderness
- Finalist and Honorable Mention, Red Hen Press Women's Prose Prize Competition, 2019 - Listen, we all bleed
- Winner, Digging Press Chapbook Series Competition, 2018 - Awabi
- Winner, Eyelands/Strange Days Books International Flash Fiction Contest, 2018 - "Coconut Octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)"
- Finalist, Permafrost Book Prize, 2018 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Honorable Mention, Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest, 2017 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Semifinalist, Conium Review Book Prize, 2016 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Shortlist, Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award, 2015 - Drafts of a Suicide Note
- Shortlist, Aeon Award, 2015 - Persimmon Wonderseeker and the Mystery of the Deadly Lambshade
Press and Media Mentions
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Award (Fiction: General) results listing, 2019.
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, Bernews, Bermuda, 2019.
- Listen, we all bleed, Phantom Power, USA, 2019.
- Drafts of a Suicide Note, Royal Gazette, Bermuda, 2018.
- Awabi, Bernews, Bermuda, 2019.
- Listen, we all bleed, Animal Sounds, UK, 2018.
- Coconut Octopus, Bernews, Bermuda, 2018