Emma Straub
Guggenheim fellow and bestselling novelist Emma Straub discusses her fiction and life as author and co-owner of Brooklyn's beloved Books Are Magic bookstore.
Why we picked this
Straub writes novels about family with the kind of warmth that never tips into sentimentality — and as the co-owner of Books Are Magic, she knows the literary world from both sides of the counter.
Emma Straub has built her career around fiction that takes family life seriously — not as backdrop but as the real subject. Her novels, including All Adults Here, This Time Tomorrow, and American Fantasy, follow characters navigating the quiet upheavals of middle age, parenthood, and the long tail of childhood. Her work earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, a distinction that reflects the literary weight her domestic-scale novels carry beneath their accessible surfaces.
This Time Tomorrow earned particular attention for its time-loop premise, which Straub uses less as genre exercise than as a vehicle for grief — a daughter cycling back to her father’s younger years just as he’s dying. It’s the kind of novel that earns its emotional payoff by being genuinely funny first. Her most recent book, American Fantasy, continues that pattern: family drama rendered with precision and a refusal to moralize.
Beyond the novels, Straub co-owns Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, a community bookstore she opened in 2017 with her husband that has become a genuine neighborhood institution. Her experience on both sides of the literary ecosystem — as a working author and as a bookseller who champions other writers — gives her an unusually clear-eyed perspective on the current state of books, publishing, and who gets to tell which stories.