Republic of Consciousness Prize, US and Canada shortlist
Bustle Best Books of Fall 2023 selection
tor.com Can’t Miss selection
Ms. Reads for the Rest of Us selection
Kobo Best of the Month selection
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?
Essays, Excerpts, Interviews
“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
“Furniture Dreams,” Menagerie
“Mute Muse,” graphic interview by Coco Picard, Electric Literature
“Frightful Impenetrability of Mundane Things,” interview with Superstition Review
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
Reviews
Wong deploys dense, theoretical wordplay . . . much of the book is disorienting . . . Wong also delivers something rare, evoking a creepy sort of glamour around books and stories, as if craving a good read is itself sometimes a form of dark desire.
Casts a curious spell despite its stylistic density and lack of traditional plot.
The Box is sui generis . . . Each chapter is a new treat, a fresh world that demands close attention and rereading. The segments are endlessly creative, wildly inventive. Stories cross genre, mixing mystery, crime, allegory, folk- and fairytale, performance art, and drug-aided fantasy . . . Wong is clearly a powerhouse writer—hyper imaginative, daring, provocative, bold. I for one can’t wait to see what’s next.
—Mark Broms, Medium
Wong’s inventive latest (after the essay collection Listen, We all Bleed) is a feast of knotty sentences . . . [With] Proustian excess, [The Box] asks thorny questions about the functions of narrative . . . Fans of experimental fiction ought to check this out.
Rather than focus on one character, Bermudian essayist and fiction writer Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s novel traces the movement of a mysterious white box made of woven paper, which can’t be opened without destroying it. The elegant mysteries only expand from there.
—Maggie Lange, Bustle
Mysterious artifacts? Check. Surreal weather? Check. The possibility of, as per the Kirkus review, “an eternal force causing mass disruptions”? Check. All of these elements can be found in Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s novel The Box; taken together, they represent a compelling argument for seeking it out.
—Tobias Carroll, tor.com
Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s latest novel is a complex examination of form, language, ideas, animacy and agency. Challenging yet gratifying, The Box switches narrators as the white paper box itself changes hands throughout the story, giving it life and meaning.
—Karla J. Strand, Ms.
Weaves an enchanting charm despite its intricate style and absence of a conventional storyline . . . The box is described as a “counterfeit thing” that bears the burden of its own non-identity . . . Wong’s novel is a captivating exploration of a mysterious object.
—Abdullah Oliver, Gift Lit
Wong displays formidable skill in this disorienting first section, intriguing us with subtle but unmistakable humor, drawing us into the highly wrought maze of her novel and making it fun. The dialogue, when it comes, is contemporary and naturalistic, creating a wonderfully funny contrast with the strangely formal and ornate narrative voice. There is a modernist flavor to Wong’s project — the snowbound city and the futility of the character’s struggle recalling Kafka’s “The Castle”; a dialogue set in a moldering junk shop is Beckettian in its bleak comedy. It’s hard to read the sentence, “Of chirp and chitter flutters like the tinkling ruckus of a restaurant from a distance elevated,” without thinking of Joyce. The puzzle of the novel is itself reminiscent of Borges. “The Box” is not an easy read, and it’s not trying to be; Wong isn’t afraid to make demands of the reader, who sometimes needs to jog to keep up.
—David Szalay, New York Times Book Review
The Box, the latest novel by Bermudian writer Mandy-Suzanne Wong, is an enigma that defies simple classification or clear resolution. Experimental in form, dystopian in setting, it follows, indirectly, the movement of an unusual box constructed of white woven paper through a city trapped in an endless snowfall that has blurred all normal social interactions. A novel of ideas it is entirely composed of interdependent but distinct narratives that vary widely in style and form . . . Ambitious and original, it will take time for me to put this strange text behind me.
—Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts
Mandy-Suzanne Wong has a fascinating perspective on the influence of ordinary objects and how they can affect us. Her novel is truly unique in its object-centered storytelling, playing off of the curiosity, the environment, and the world that encapsulates those who participate in the box’s journey.
—Carolyn Combs, Superstition Review
Without a standard plot or conventionally-constructed cast, Wong has designed her polyvocal, dystopian narrative to draw attention to the building material of our world, tangible and intangible, within and without the page. In doing so, she cultivates a way of hearing in which borders are broken down, not only between different peoples but between the animate and the inanimate, unseating anthropocentric philosophies that are the foundation of ongoing dystopias . . . In many past fables, legends and myths, a box’s mystery had to be solved and possessed. In this new addition to that tradition, curiosity is welcome but strangeness is treasured, vulnerability is sacred and we are all composites of each other in an earth-grand-thing-complex.
—Akilah White, Moko
With an unclear timeline, The Box forces you to take in every detail to uncover the true puzzle behind this paper box, making every single conversation, side glance and breath demand attention. Wong’s powerful writing makes this story endlessly creative and inventive . . . We have to solve the mystery that Wong has manufactured, giving us little guidance other than the rich details that she has sprinkled about, probably taking more than one read through to gather every breadcrumb and puzzle piece Wong provides. Wong’s perfectly crafted writing is shown through her meticulousness, but she doesn’t shy away with her characters and how they’re represented. No two characters are written the same way—that’s how each personality bleeds through without explicitly being told.
Megan Hatton, White Wall Review
