To discuss the release of her new fantasy novel, KateDwyer spent a morning with emmastraub — a writer known for sunny, insightful book-club hits — to discuss childhood nostalgia, her relationship with her father, and why she tackled time travel
Photo: Sara Messinger By the time I meet Emma Straub outside the American Museum of Natural History, it’s a few minutes past 10 a.m. and the author and bookstore owner has already traveled to her youth and back.
It may come as a surprise that Straub — a writer known for sunny, insightful book-club hits — tackled time travel, a motif often reserved for sci-fi writers. She wrestled with the challenge, worried that sci-fi authors might say she had no business riffing on their plot device . So she studied up on time-travel novels such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Jack Finney’s Time and Again.
Photo: Sara Messinger “You would make a plan in advance on the telephone,” she says, as if describing something completely unheard of today . “And then you would go and meet your friends there. You’d gather people up like a tornado until you were roaming around the streets with 15 teenagers going from house to house and diner to diner.” But what happened if you and the group kept missing each other? “There were beepers,” she says.
After stints as an editorial assistant in publishing, a personal assistant to Stephin Merritt , a bookseller at BookCourt, a writing instructor, and a full-time novelist, she and her husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, created Books Are Magic in Cobble Hill in 2017. When it opened, Straub says, the couple wanted to bring an indie bookstore to their neighborhood since they’re “the best kind of natural gathering places,” she says.