MENDELL STATION
“A surprising and evocative debut.” —Grace D. Li, New York Times bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief
A tender debut that follows a woman who, after her best friend’s death, loses her faith and quits her job to join the postal service, quickly becoming an ‘essential worker’ as the city shuts down.
It’s January 2020, and Miriam is already getting a sense that the world might be ending. First, she learns that her best friend, Esther, has died. Then her faith in God—in everything, really—follows suit.
“A surprising and evocative debut.” —Grace D. Li, New York Times bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief
A tender debut that follows a woman who, after her best friend’s death, loses her faith and quits her job to join the postal service, quickly becoming an ‘essential worker’ as the city shuts down.
It’s January 2020, and Miriam is already getting a sense that the world might be ending. First, she learns that her best friend, Esther, has died. Then her faith in God—in everything, really—follows suit. Her job teaching Scripture at a private Christian school suddenly seems untenable, so she quits. Thankfully, the postal service is hiring.
While Miriam finds comfort in her route, the mail truck can hardly outpace the memory of her lost friend and eroded faith. She finds herself composing letters to Esther that she will never deliver, reflecting on their shared childhoods and deep understanding of each other’s difficult families.
Mendell Station depicts one woman’s deliverance through the peculiar rhythms of work, and the beauty found in small details and gestures, those quotidian labors of love.
- Bloomsbury
- Hardcover
- July 2025
- 208 Pages
- 9781639736188
Buy the Book
$26.99
About J.B. Hwang
J.B. Hwang received her MFA in Fiction from the University of Florida, and her short fiction and translation can be found in The Temz Review, The Denver Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, and december magazine. She lived in San Francisco for eight years and worked as a mail carrier during the pandemic. She currently lives in Philadelphia.
Praise
“Like all the best novels, J. B. Hwang’s Mendell Station succeeds on many levels: an elegy to a beloved friend, it is also an account of what it feels like to lose one kind of faith (and gain another) and a trenchant and humane portrait of San Francisco as seen from the point of view of its postal workers. An intimate, generous, and funny debut from a writer we can expect to hear more of.” —David Leavitt, author of Shelter in Place
“A surprising and evocative debut, Mendell Station is both a glimpse into a singular moment in time and a deeply moving meditation on grief, isolation, and belonging.” —Grace D. Li, New York Times bestselling author of Portrait of a Thief
“Achingly gorgeous and quietly devastating, Mendell Station is a work of genius about the collision of grief and faith and a love letter to community set during the rapture event and purgatory of the pandemic . . . Incredibly vulnerable and honest, the place it occupies in my mind is tender to the touch. It will stay with me for a long time.” —Ling Ling Huang, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of Natural Beauty
“Tender, tender, tender. A raw slice of life that will leave you weeping. A magnifying glass into the seesaw of female friendships and the grief that comes with it.” —Carolyn Huynh, author of The Fortunes of Jaded Women and The Family Recipe
“With astonishing dynamism and empathy, J. B. Hwang’s Mendell Station accomplishes a great deal over its humble page count, painting a moving flash memory about the earliest days of the covid-19 pandemic, imbued with the sometimes subtle, sometimes overwhelming grief that often accompanies the human experience of pain that can’t be fully understood.” —Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You and Flux
Discussion Questions
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“Dennis said Western culture was a death-denying society that ill-prepared us for the inevitable” (10-11). Consider this assertion by Patty, Minyoung, and Miriam’s grief counselor. Do you agree? Why or why not?
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How does Miriam’s faith shift throughout the book? Even though she moves away from her religious faith, is there a different type of faith or spirituality that grows in its place?
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“I hadn’t realized how much I had to say until I met Esther” (28). Do you have a friend who has had a similarly profound impact on your identity as Esther does on Miriam? Consider sharing your experiences with your book club.
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“I am so used to telling you everything that I don’t know how to stop” (39). What function do Miriam’s undeliverable letters to Esther serve in the novel? How do they aid Miriam’s grieving process?
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Miriam remarks, “There were no redeemed in San Francisco that morning” (49). What does the idea of redemption mean in the novel?
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“Family was such a fraught term for me, I didn’t know if I wanted to embroil Esther into it” (69). How does the novel portray the differences between family and friends—and the idea of friends as found family?
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Consider these statements: “Sanctifying work contained a desire to transcend the material and mundane by digging deeper into the material and mundane. It was not about human recognition. Though maybe it was a ploy to create low-paid, productive workers who didn’t revolt—the ‘opiate for the masses’” (73). How does the novel portray work, specifically Miriam’s job as a carrier? How might her feelings and beliefs about work change over the course of the book?
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“I tried to imagine what it would look like for my various selves to love each other. I couldn’t” (85). Throughout the novel, Miriam frequently references the different versions of herself and how they come into conflict with each other. Do you relate to her feelings? Do you think she reconciles her various selves by the novel’s end?
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Miriam says that Minyoung is “the type of person who could befriend her own sadness and materialize it into ritual and art. We all interacted with Esther’s absence in our own ways” (115). What are some other ways of grieving explored by the novel?
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Speaking of her coworkers, Miriam says, “They knew nothing about Esther or my family, and I knew nothing of their personal dramas. But we knew what we went through today” (131). Discuss the specific type of camaraderie of the postal workers as portrayed by the novel, particularly in relation to Miriam’s earlier admission that she and her mother were “lonely but together” (96). In what ways is the community of her coworkers like a family, and in what ways are they different?
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“Nothing could prepare me for a sudden death. My life had fallen apart. And yet, some people experienced it continually. Entire communities, young and old, here in the States and abroad, lived with regular, constant death. And I knew now that each loss brought all the other ones back” (145). How does the novel portray both societal and individual grief? How do you think we mourn each type of loss differently—or similarly? Five years out from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, what perspective might the book shed on these moments of mass loss and grief?
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At the end of the novel, Miriam asks Manwai to drop off all but her last letter to Esther in the post office’s Return to Sender bins. From there, Manwai tells her, the letters will likely be sent to the dead letters office in Atlanta, and then sold at auction, a prospect Miriam believes Esther would have liked. What is the significance of this action?
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The book represents postal workers as largely anonymous and unseen to the world around them: “But we and our work were largely unknown to our customers as we slipped by and dropped things off . . . The only witness to the postal service was itself” (132). How does this anonymity affect Miriam and her coworkers, in both positive and negative ways?
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At the end of the novel, Miriam marvels over how the world is “transformed” in the rain (186). How do you think Miriam herself is transformed?