Emma Straub

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

"From the New York Times' bestselling author of The Vacationers, a smart, highly entertaining novel about a tight-knit group of friends from college--their own kids now going to college--and what it means to finally grow up well after adulthood has set in. Friends and former college bandmates Elizabeth and Andrew and Zoe have watched one another marry, buy real estate, and start businesses and families, all while trying to hold on to the identities...

In 1920, Elsa Emerson is born in Door County, Wisconsin. Her family owns the Cherry County Playhouse, and Elsa relishes appearing onstage. But when tragedy strikes her family, acting becomes more than a child's game of pretend. Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, who refashions her and renames her Laura Lamont. Laura experiences all the glamour of the heady pinnacle of stardom in the studio-system era, but...

A girl and her eccentric grandmother spend a day being silly together.

"Straub creates characters as recognizable as a best friend, and follows them through moments of triumph and transformation with wit, vulnerability, and dazzling insight."--P. [4] of cover.

The acclaimed bestselling author returns to Symphony Space to discuss her latest novel. Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth tells the enthralling and tender story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives. In conversation with Emma Straub (Modern Lovers). An excerpt from the novel will be performed by Alan Alda.