FOR LAURA LAMONT’S LIFE IN PICTURES:
“Fantastic…a stunningly intimate portrayal of one woman’s life. A-”—Entertainment Weekly
“Straub’s brisk pacing and emotionally complex characters keep the story fresh…This bewitching novel is ultimately a celebration of those moments when we drop the act and play the hardest role of all: ourselves.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
“[A] timeless tale with true heartfelt warmth throughout…one of the most entertaining novels this fall.”—Matchbook Magazine
“delightful… mesmerizing.”—The Miami Herald
“at once a delicious depiction of Hollywood’s golden age and a sweet, fulfilling story about one woman’s journey through fame, love, and loss.”—Boston Globe
“Straub makes masterful use of the golden age of Hollywood to tap contemporary questions about the price of celebrity and a working mother’s struggle to balance all that matters.”—People
“Straub vividly recaptures the glamour and meticulously contrived mythology of the studio-system era.”—USA Today
“big-hearted…a witty examination of the psychic costs of reinvention in Hollywood’s golden age.”—The Washington Post
“[With] effortless prose and precise observations…Straub’s novel explores themes of identity, career and motherhood through the filter of one woman’s life experience…an entertaining narrative.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Laura Lamont might be the most anticipated debut of the year. It’s easy to understand the hullabaloo; Straub’s style is clear and engaging, and her plot balances the glamour of the Hollywood Golden Age with trenchant thematic links to issues of contemporary working women. The result is a delightful, entertaining read with substance.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Like the protagonist in her new novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Emma Straub is a rising star.”—TimeOut Chicago
“Will appeal to any girl who has left a small town behind to follow her dreams to the big city.”—Marie Claire
“Dramatic, human and historical: like a classic Hollywood movie…Straub knows when to linger and when to be brief, and her portrayal of Elsa/Laura’s relationships is exquisite…Peppered with stunningly crafted sentences and heart-twisting storytelling, the richness of this full life is portrayed with perceptive clarity.”—BUST Magazine
“Straub imbues her writing with surprising insights and wit… [her] writing reminds the reader how good literary fiction can precisely capture the human experience.”—Pop Matters
FOR OTHER PEOPLE WE MARRIED:
“Straub’s collection of short stories is a resplendent debut, arriving in a whirl of buzz, thanks to her appearances in Tin House, the Paris Review, and Slate. Heir to Ann Beattie and Lorrie Moore, Straub evinces marvelous literary confidence in her deadpan hilarity, eye for redolent details, and acute psychological insights. She also excels at the art of sudden reversals as she takes measure of the unbridgeable gaps that divide us and the leaps that save us. The deeply involving title story is one of several featuring magnetic Franny Gold, whose entanglements cause equal degrees of bliss and anguish. Elsewhere, three young college English professors share a tiny office, and two very different sisters make the mistake of vacationing together. In the standout, Abraham’s Enchanted Forest, a teenage daughter assesses her life with her hippie parents, who run a funky roadside attraction. In the wistful, funny, and unnerving Fly-Over State, a New Yorker comes undone in Wisconsin. Straub’s stories glow and pulse and, like sea anemones, are far more complex and dangerous than their bright and beckoning appearances suggest.” — Donna Seaman, Booklist
“A fresh voice from a writer who deserves discovery.” –Kirkus
“It is rare that I will love every story in a collection but I did love each of the twelve stories in this collection both individually and also as a whole collection with a distinctive shape. Each story was intimate and engaging and really, really clean. I never found a word or idea out of place, nothing that pulled me from the stories or the people and places borne of Straub’s imagination.”–Roxane Gay, HTMLGIANT
Read the complete review here.
“These quiet epiphanies in Straub’s stories place her in the company of Beattie and Moore, and the voices she creates are contemporary. When I finished reading this exquisite collection, I flipped back to the beginning of the book and stared at the table of contents. The book was suddenly heavier in my hands—suddenly filled with the weight of all these character’s silent fantasies, side-thoughts and careful revelations.Other People We Married is a captivating first collection of short stories for this writer; I look forward to her future work.” –Bracha Goykadosh, The Rumpus
Read the complete review here.
“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, The Dallas Morning News
“Other People We Married is keenly observed, deeply felt, and an absolute delight to read. Straub’s characters are authentic, and they live in the real world, with all its weirdness, uncertainty, and “well, this isn’t what I expected it to be”-ness. If you can make it through these pages without wanting to find Emma Straub and put her in your pocket, you’re a stronger person than I. Highly recommended.”–Rebecca Joines Schinsky, The Book Lady’s Blog
Read the complete review here.
“Stories that start as satirical portraits, have a more complicated terrain underneath. At the nucleus of every story is a woman (or, in the case of “Hot Springs Eternal”, a man) whose life has revealed itself – in a strange fixation on a younger man, a vacation gone sour, or through sharing a joint with the grocery bagger who lives in his parent’s basement next door – as out of control.”–Lauren Belski, Electric Literature
Read the complete review here.
“As I read each of the twelve stories in the collection, I felt intensely connected to the characters, their ordinary lives so full of love, longing, joy and regret that it’s all they can do to maintain the surface calm. And it’s there, deep inside their heads and hearts (where Emma Straub firmly plants you), that everything is familiar, even if the New York neighborhood or the Wisconsin suburb is not. Her characters’ observations and the things they say are so telling and true, and yet so much of their stories lies in their silences, in the things they never quite say aloud, sometimes even in the spaces between the words that Emma Straub writes.” –Judy Clement Wall, Used Furniture Review
Read the complete review here.
“…Emma Straub crafts characters so compelling that they linger quietly on the periphery of one’s consciousness days after reading, waiting patiently for the reader to consider and then understand them. Trendier writers may grab a reader’s attention with outrageous spectacle, but it’s the strong, silent types like Straub who are the true writers to watch.” –Yennie Cheung, for The Hipster Book Club
Read the complete review here.
“Through the dozen stories told within the binding of this book, Ms. Straub takes her readers many places, shows them the full range of emotional color, tone and hue through the peculiar prestidigitation of her words. To return again to a simple truth, Emma Straub reminds the reader of the particular joy of discovering the terra incognita of a story well told, of characters well-wrought, and of a meaningful denouement—things all too often missing in this modern age of the oblique.
May this be only the first such collection from Emma Straub—and may hers be the success that her oversized talent deserves.”
–Vinton Rafe McCabe, for the New York Journal of Books
Read the complete review here.
“Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Straub’s work is its effortlessness. Despite her language and prose style–both of which are lovely–this balanced collection possesses the unique quality of feeling somehow unwritten, as if the stories were born by themselves. I almost forgot I was reading, that’s how immersed I was, how well Straub connects, and how easy she makes it all feel, which we know is incredibly difficult.”
–Sara Lippman, for PANK
Read the complete review here.
“For me, her writing is that of a more prolific author–it’s like Emma has been writing for decades. I am awed by the way she is able to take a simple story (semi-estranged sisters on an ill-advised trip together; a young married couple from New York trapped in a small town life) and craft it into something much bigger, more beautiful and infinitely complex. It is a testament to her talent that my friend Lydia emailed me while we were both reading the book; she said “I’m reading it as slowly as I can to make it last.” We agreed it ended too soon for us–I would have happily read three times this many stories and I still could have asked for more.”
–Melissa Klug, for the Gutenberg Girls
Read the complete review here.
“From first line to last, Straub is a pleasure to read and I wait in wonder to see what she writes next.”
–Carmen Johnson, for [tk] reviews
Read the complete review here.
“Emma Straub is a native New Yorker, but any suspicion that she harbors some anti-Midwest snobbery will pretty much evaporate once you finish her funny, charming, and compulsively readable Fly-Over State, the story of two East Coast transplants to Wisconsin. Fly-Over State exists somewhere in the territory between short story and novella — a fly-over genre, I guess. It’s less than forty pages, packaged in this edition with an additional short work of fiction, “Hot Springs Eternal.” Straub does in just a few pages what other, much older writers have been unsuccessfully trying to do for a long while — write an affectionate portrait of life in the Midwest from an outsider’s perspective, with a keen sense of humor and without a hint of condescension.”
–Michael Schaub, for Bookslut
Read the complete review here.
“These are sharp, perfectly rendered pieces, funny and beautifully written and deeply affecting. My only complaint about this book is that it ends far too quickly; I hope very much that Emma Straub will publish a novel someday.”
–Emily Mandel, for The Millions
Read the complete review here.
“Happy endings are rare in “Other People We Married,” but the poignant conclusions to each of the 12 stories complement Straub’s genuine, complex characters. This realism serves to create a nuanced, thoughtful depiction of love and loneliness in the modern world.” –Hayley Cuccinello, The Harvard Crimson
Read the complete review here.
Featured Fiction Writer on The Nervous Breadown, April 25-May 2, 2010
Read Self-Interview and Novel Excerpt here.
Piece about Bookselling Writers in the New York Times Book Review
Interview with Jamie Feldmar for Gothamist
Interview with Liz Colville for Flavorwire
Interview with Michele Filgate for Bookslut
Poets + Writers Names Me One of 33 Literary Twitter Feeds to Follow
Interview with American Short Fiction
Interview with Dossier Journal
Interview with The Magazine of Yoga
Emma on the Algonquin Books blog
Emma on The Reagan Arthur blog
Emma on The Discomfort Zone, a National Football Post Podcast. (Yes, really. It’s Episode 53)
Emma on Shya Scanlon’s Tiny Facebook Interview Series.
I’m in the Brilliant + Highbrow quadrant of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix!
The Huffington Post gets me to read to you from the comfort of my dining room.
The New York Press tells you what you need to know about me.
Metro gives small presses (and OPWM) some love.
The NY Daily News gossip page Gatecrasher notices me, finally.
The darling Michele Filgate gave a nice shout-out to my book on NHPR.
The New York Post wrote a deliciously sweet piece about my book launch party at BookCourt.
I tell you what songs to listen to on Largehearted Boy.
In the new issue of Oxford American, Kevin Brockmeier listed Fly-Over State as one of Ten Very Great Short Books. Here’s what he had to say:
“The first entry in Flatmancrooked’s Launch series for debut authors, Straub’s novella has the smarts and humor of a Lorrie Moore or a Laurie Colwin or a Laurie Anderson–any number of Lauries. It’s a fish-out-of-water story that slowly transforms into a fish-out-of-the-pond-and-into-the-river story and then, before you realize it, ends and leaves to guess which way the current is flowing.”
On her blog Comma ‘n Sentence, Laryssa Wirstiuk includes Emma on her list of Top 15 Writers under 40.
Emma writes about ritual (and writing in bed) for Big Other.
