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The cover has been unveiled for Emma Straub’s forthcoming novel, Modern Lovers.  We’ve embedded the full image for the jacket design above—what do you think?

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Straub expressed how much she likes the cover and how “it conveys movement, and action, and all the frenetic possibility of sidewalk life. This book is about all the daily drama of the human experience, of what happens when you’re knocked slightly off your axis but still in your own walls and routines, still bumping into your neighbors, still doing your thing.”

Rachel Willey served as the book designer and Leah Goren created the illustration. Riverhead Books, an imprint at Penguin Random House, has scheduled the release date for May 31, 2016.

Author Emma Straub wrote an essay for Rookie on “How to Write About Real People.” Straub discusses her personal experiences with fictionalizing people she has known in her real life. Straub confesses to drawing inspiration from her brother and one of his past romantic relationships to create two characters in her latest novel, The Vacationers.

Straub (pictured, via) feels that all writers have the right to do this, but they should be aware that they can really hurt a person’s feelings by choosing to exercise this right. She also cautions that if a person recognizes themselves in a story that you write, you cannot compel them to feel at peace with your choice. Here’s an excerpt from Straub’s piece: (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Last year, Sari Botton served as the editor of an anthology called Goodbye to All That: On Loving and Leaving New York. Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro, Emma Straub, and 25 other writers penned essays on how they renounced residency from New York city.

Botton has been working on a follow-up entitled Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love For New York. Some of the contributors to the new project include Elizabeth Gilbert, Susan Orlean, and Nick Flynn.

Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will release the book on October 14, 2014. What do you think?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here are some literary events to jump-start your week. To get your event posted on our calendar, visit our Facebook Your Literary Event page. Please post your event at least one week prior to its date.

Sherman Alexie will be speaking about his new collection, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories at Barnes & Noble Union Square. See him on Monday, October 15th starting 7 p.m. (New York, NY)

The next installment of the Franklin Park Reading Series will feature Emma Straub, Michael Kimball and more. Hear them on Monday, October 15th at the Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden starting 8 p.m. (Brooklyn, NY)

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Emma Straub is a delight. Her first book of short stories, Other People We Married, was praised by Kirkus Reviews for its "fresh voice from a writer who deserves discovery," and Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, raved, "Emma Straub is worthy of our adoration. These stories are wise, surprising, hilarious, and unforgettable." Her debut novel, [...]

What if novelists opened for rock bands?

Novelist Emma Straub (pictured) will tour with Magnetic Fields in November, reading from her debut novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. Click here for ticket information.

Straub wrote about the upcoming dates here: “This November, I will be hitting the road again with my dear friends The Magnetic Fields … this time, as the opening act. I’ll be reading before their shows in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and DC! Expect to hear a short section of the novel as well as some other fun pieces … The above photo was taken on the last night of the first US leg of the Tour at the Bottom of the Sea. You can see all of our adventures here.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Tumblr social network has helped countless writers connect with readers over the last few years. We finally decided to open a GalleyCat Tumblr page, a warehouse for all the opinions, videos, photos and other items that didn’t quite fit on our publishing blog.

We caught up with Tumblr literary outreach Rachel Fershleiser for some advice about using the network. She shared five useful tips for writers who want to explore the social network. You can read her link-filled advice below…

If you have a Tumblr post you think we should see, just add the ‘galleycat’ tag to your Tumblr post. We will use the tag as a source for our own posts. The Millions created a handy Tumblr directory for readers and writers as well.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Need to do some research for your novel but don’t have a big budget for the trip? Author Emma Straub shared a simple research trip secret: the Twitter house swap.

During our Morning Media Menu interview today, Straub (pictured, via) shared research tips and talked about revising her upcoming novel, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures. West coast readers can catch Straub this week at Skylight Books and Booksmith.

Follow this link to listen to the complete interview. Here’s an excerpt: “I’m doing a house swap. We are here for three weeks and it’s free–that’s the key to everything. [We connected] over Twitter. The woman I’m swapping with is also an author. We’re both doing the same thing. I’m revising my novel; she’s revising her novel. Now we are both doing it at each others’ houses. It’s been a fabulous success so far, but it’s the first time I’ve done this. The last time I came to do research, we stayed in a hotel and that gets really expensive. Twitter is good for lots of reasons, but one of them is making new friends who will let you sleep in their house.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Mark Armstrong of Longreads posts his top essays and articles over at Mother Jones each week, and this time around I’m his “Featured Longreader.” Here’s some of what I’ve been reading recently:

A Disney trip with kids meets lots of furtive weed smoking in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Rough Guide to Disney World. “It was a double hallucination,” he says. “You were hallucinating inside of Walter Disney’s hallucination. That’s what he wanted.” Already an official #longreads pick, I know, but: it’s so, so good and only gets better as it goes.

I’ve also been revisiting Eudora Welty’s fiction in preparation for a Granta event [held at the New School last night]. “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “Petrified Man” are two of her most beloved stories, and with good reason: they’re funny and relentless and so accurately and minutely observed. Returning to them, I realized what an influence she must have had on Dorothy Allison (whose Bastard Out of Carolina, a #longlongread, I also recommend). Then I confirmed it. “I was seduced by Eudora Welty,” Allison wrote in 2005, though “I had every reason to distrust her, as I had distrusted Faulkner—both of them products of the middle-class South I disdained.”

To round out this unexpectedly southern round-up, for anyone who missed it last week, I recommend my friend Anna Holmes’ essay on the female Freedom Riders of the Civil Rights movement. One, a factory worker and mother of two traveling after a miscarriage, refused to give up her seat to a white couple and kicked a deputy in the groin when he tried to make her.

I spend so little time around here these days, I forgot to mention my inclusion in Paper Magazine’s Lit It Crowd. I love the photo; all my companions — Thessaly LaForce, Sadie Stein, Emma Straub, and Hamish Robertson — look dead sexy (which they are), while I’m off to the side, hands folded, gazing skyward and seemingly clucking like a delighted schoolmarm/auntie.

It’s a group, Lorin Stein said, “lousy with Parisians”: Thessaly and Sadie are editors and writers at The Paris Review Daily, and Emma and I are contributors. News of Thessaly’s upcoming departure for the Iowa Writers Workshop and that The New Yorker’s Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn will be taking over prompted The New York Observer’s Kat Stoeffel to note the Paper feature, in “Les Filles du Blog,” and to observe that “Although many intellectual and literary magazines have come under scrutiny lately for a lack of female bylines,&rd

Rather than following the traditional book tour circuit, author Emma Straub will visit twelve different locations around the world from her book of short stories–recording the journey at this blog.

Here’s more about the tour: “There are twelve stories in Other People We Married, and each story takes place in a different location. Every month for the next year, I will read a story in its location, or as close as I can get. This blog will follow my travels, my snacks, my impulse-buys, and more. For bonus points, send me a photo of OPWM in an exotic locale, and I will post it here, and send you a postcard in return.”

Last year we spoke with David Daley, founder of Five Chapters and publisher of Straub’s book.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The second season of Chapters, the reading series I curate for Girls Write Now, begins this Friday, March 25, when our delightful first guest, writer and mentor Emma Straub, reads from her new story collection, Other People We Married. Join us at 7 p.m. at the historic John Street Church (no affiliation).

Coming up: Anna North, America Pacifica, on April 29; Tayari Jones, Silver Sparrow, on May 20; and Kate Christensen, The Astral, on June 17.