Today, Riverhead Books published their edition of Other People We Married. I could not be more excited–the book still has the same gorgeous cover, designed by my handsome husband, and has some nice new blurbs from Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Thisbe Nissen, and all the typos have been fixed. Hooray!

Lots of exciting things happened today: Elissa Schappell gave OPWM a shout-out on Vanity Fair’s Just My Type, a really good interview went up on Bomb, I made some banana bread, and I made a Facebook event page for my One and Only reading this spring. See below for photographic proof that Stephin and I have been doing work on our muse(s).

Hope to see you there!

love,
Emma

Click here to watch me interview all the 5 Under 35 Winners, and the writers who nominated them.

Note: you can tell when the cameraman tells me I’m too loud. It happens repeatedly. What can I say?

love
Emma

This is how Robby leads into our interview:

“I posted my review of Emma Straub’s Other People We Married a few days ago, and because I am one of the luckiest people on this Earth we call home, I got the chance to interview her. It was a quick exchange, and I would’ve kept it going forever if I could, but Ms. Straub has better things to do than converse with overemotional teenage boys who hide in their bedrooms and write angsty poetry. Emma, thank you. Readers, thank you. This is her website. This is her Twitter. Read her book. She is a gift.”

Click here to read the interview.

Yours,
Emma

The upcoming week is chockablock with live appearances, both live and transmitted via ethernet (what is that, anyway) tubes or whatever.

TUESDAY: Edan Lepucki and I are having a Live Chat on Goodreads at 5pm EST/2pm PST. We will talk about books and writers and Timmy Riggins and California produce, maybe. Tune in to find out!

WEDNESDAY: I’ll be reading at Skylight Books, the finest book emporium this side of the 405 freeway. (Note: I have no idea where the freeway is, and apologize for anyone I might be insulting. I take surface roads exclusively.) There will be brownies! You should come! 7pm!

THURSDAY: After a brief romance with JetBlue, I’ll be reading at the Booksmith, in San Francisco! Come and tell me which burritos to eat, I beg you. If I can find delicious cookies in between the airport and the bookstore, I will bring them with me. 7pm!

Hooray for California and the internet!

love
Emma

This week was a busy one– not only did I drive to Oberlin and back, but I also did an interview with Gothamist and appeared on the back page of the New York Times Book Review.

Also, if you missed my Happy Ending appearance, you can listen to the entire show on WNYC. Technology! It’s incredible. I’m about twenty-three minutes in, but you should listen to the whole thing, of course.

If you’re in NYC and are free tomorrow night, do join me at WORD for a family-centric installment of Largehearted Lit. I’ll be reading with my dad, as well as the brothers Grossman. You don’t want to miss it.

Yours,
Emma

So far I’ve met with two bookclubs to talk about OPWM, my own and my mother-in-law’s, but I have two more on the schedule, and am hungry for more! If you’re in a bookclub and you think it might be fun to have me bake you brownies and talk about my stories, please holler! I’m in NYC, but am traveling elsewhere for the book, so if you’re in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any of the other wonderful places I’m going, we could totally make it work. Just a thought.

Love,
Emma

The finale of The Bachelor aired last night, which means that I am finally free of Brad Womack. You can read my write-up of the final episode here. It contains the following paragraph:

“The jeweler comes to visit Brad, and comes bearing some giant diamonds. Neil Lane is very, very tan. Brad picks a ring, and then stares like a labrador at the beach. If only someone would throw a tennis ball off the balcony, and we could be rid of him forever.”

In other news, I’m participating in the Goodread short story panel this week, and you should join the conversation! Free, easy, and you can wear your pajamas! Just like me!

Yours,
Emma

This morning my little Google Alert pinged with an exciting new review– The Dallas Morning News reviewed OPWM, and once I agreed to subscribe for a week (!), I could actually read it. Luckily, the review was positive, otherwise, I would be very sad about all the Dallas news I now have access to. I’ll post the review below, just in case some of you aren’t subscribers.

Starting on Monday, I’m participating in a week-long virtual short story panel on Goodreads. Do you have a Goodreads profile? I do. Maybe we should be friends there? We probably should. Then we can talk about books and you can see what I’m reading and I can see what you’re reading and the world will be a glorious place.

Cheers! It’s the weekend!

Emma

Book Review: Emma Straub’s Other People We Married

In Emma Straub’s witty debut story collection, Other People We Married, New Yorkers venture outside their home city to see what the rest of America has to offer, and these trips force the realities of their relationships into stark relief.

In “A Map of Modern Palm Springs,” two sisters meet in California for a vacation together. They head to Joshua Tree National Park, about which the local they scored drugs from warned them, “It’s the desert. It’s only exciting if you’ve never been there before.” It also can be exciting if you take hallucinogenic mushrooms, which the older, more settled and successful sister does, prompting the younger sister to consider ditching her.

In the touching “Hot Springs Eternal,” Richard and Teddy, a gay couple from New York, visit Glenwood Springs in Colorado, and Teddy, the younger man, gets a kick out of the rampant bad taste on display, enjoying hotels “that looked on the verge of destruction, with words spelled incorrectly, or ones that looked like cottages where Snow White or the Swiss Miss might work at the front desk.” Their relationship appears doomed at the outset, with Richard feeling older and crankier, and no longer amused with Teddy’s antics, but the story ends with an old-fashioned gesture of chivalry: Richard takes off his T-shirt to reveal the “pale expanse” of belly about which he’s sensitive, and offers it to Teddy, who lacks a shirt.

In the quirky “Fly-Over State,” a New York woman named Susan finds herself sentenced to Wisconsin, where her husband has taken an academic job, and she has little to do but study the habits of the locals, in particular the grown son of her neighbors, who introduces himself as “Mud” and lives in his parents’ basement. Although she fears Mud is a “serial killer,” Susan takes to him, as he displays “the first sign of unfriendliness” she’s encountered since moving to Wisconsin. Mud asks whether living New York is like it is in the movies, and she thinks, “nothing was as much like the movies as the last month of my life, when strange women brought me lemonade and baked goods, which I then consumed without worry that I was being poisoned for the lease to my Co-Op.”

A fly-over state resident reading a collection like this might worry that the writer is going to make fun of other parts of the country, or depict non-New Yorkers behaving in some prejudiced or provincial way, but Straub doesn’t. Instead she’s out to convey the charm and unique attributes of the variety of places she depicts, even if she does take time to delight in each locale’s home-grown kitsch.

Some of Straub’s stories are most memorable for their amusing one-liners, such as this one from “Some People Must Really Fall in Love”: “A waiter appeared next to us, a kid with a beaded necklace and a surfer’s tan. I hated for him to find out we were in Ohio ; how painful that would be.” But there are other stories that build a deeper resonance, particularly those that move beyond an examination of the romantic and professional dissatisfaction of young adults, such as the moving “Puttanesca,” which explores the complicated feelings of a woman who was widowed at a young age as she tries to carry on with a subsequent relationship, and in “Marjorie and the Birds,” about another widow who begins to take bird-watching classes at the Museum of Natural History.

A good sense of humor is a great place to start as a writer, and Emma Straub is off to a promising beginning with these funny, sensitive stories.

Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, is being released this month by The Permanent Press. She is the Books & Writers Editor of NewWest.Net.

An interview I just did with Liz Colville for Flavorwire went live today, and you can read the whole thing here. Should you be averse to clicking on links, though, here’s a tiny excerpt:

LC: Any advice to other young writers emerging in the age of the Internet?

ES: Be friendly. Be kind. Say yes.

That about sums up my entire philosophy.

love
Emma

So here I am in Washington, DC, for AWP, the annual writers’ conference. Last night in the hotel bar, a friend introduced me to one of the editors from American Short Fiction, to whom I said, “I’m your Miss February!” which is a funny thing to say to a stranger. And lo, it’s true. ASF is a fabulous magazine and I’m so delighted that they asked. You can also read a short interview they did with me here.

If you too find yourself at AWP, I will be selling my book at Table H-20 for the next three days. I could only fit a small number of books in my suitcase, so I would recommend you swing by earlier rather than later.

Also, if you have thoughts about what I should be doing/eating/seeing while I’m in DC, please holler.

love
Emma