Today (April 10th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Jean Kwok’s novel Mambo in Chinatown. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Mambo in Chinatown

“The kind of book where I put it down, closed my eyes, and the characters were still dancing in my mind. Sweet and lovely, filled with old-world tradition, Chinese superstition, and the complicated dance of forbidden love.” — Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Wong grew up in New York’s Chinatown, the older daughter of a Beijing ballerina and a noodle maker. Though an ABC (American-born Chinese), Charlie’s entire world has been limited to this small area. Now grown, she lives in the same tiny apartment with her widower father and her eleven-year-old sister, and works— miserably—as a dishwasher.

But when she lands a job as a receptionist at a ballroom dance studio, Charlie gains access to a world she hardly knew existed, and everything she once took to be certain turns upside down. Gradually, at the dance studio, awkward Charlie’s natural talents begin to emerge. With them, her perspective, expectations, and sense of self are transformed—something she must take great pains to hide from her father and his suspicion of all things western. As Charlie blossoms, though, her sister becomes chronically ill. When Pa insists on treating his ailing child exclusively with eastern practices to no avail, Charlie is forced to try to reconcile her two selves and her two worlds— eastern and western, old world and new—to rescue her little sister without sacrificing her newfound confidence and identity.

A Short Q & A with Jean Kwok

What were the seeds of this book?

When I was an immigrant child growing up in an unheated apartment in the slums of Brooklyn, I desperately envied my friends who took ballet lessons. There was no time for any sort of extracurricular activities in a working class life. After school, I went with my family to the sweatshop in Chinatown and worked there until late in the night, even though I was only a child then.

It wasn’t until many years later when I was studying at Harvard that I dared explore the things I loved: writing and dance. I’d entered college as a physics major, determined to embark on a financially stable career, but finally felt safe enough there to believe that I would never need to return to my life at the clothing factory. I became an English major and dreamed of being a writer. At the same time, I started taking dance lessons and thereby discovered my other passion.

After graduation, I was searching for a day job to support my writing and stumbled across an ad in the newspaper that read, “Wanted: Professional Ballroom Dancer, Will Train.” Somehow, miraculously, I survived the interview, audition and three-week training class to be hired by Fred Astaire Studios in New York City. I worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer and won Top Professional Female in national competition before leaving to attend the MFA program at Columbia University.

That combination of my working class background and my life in ballroom provided the basis for Mambo in Chinatown.

Which part of this book is most important to you?

I wanted to tell the stories of the Asian Americans who don’t often appear in the media – namely, the low-achieving ones. I wrote this book for all of the people, regardless of race, who are invisible to us: the ones we pass every day in taxis, restaurants and dry cleaners, whose stories often go untold. Most people who escape from a life of low-wage labor choose professions like medicine or accounting. They don’t tend to become writers. It was a difficult choice for me as well but in the end, I’m glad I have the privilege of trying to write about the worlds I have left behind. Although my own life is now quite different, my heart remains in Chinatown.

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

For me, fiction is always an indirect way of revealing the truth. I was born with a gift for school but at home, I was not considered very bright or successful at all. Just like my heroine Charlie, I was terrible at cooking, cleaning and listening to orders. I was a disaster as a Chinese daughter. I’ve often thought that without my ability at school, I would very likely be a dishwasher at a restaurant somewhere, just as Charlie is in the novel. I wanted to tell the story of an awkward young woman living a life of poverty who discovers something she loves – ballroom dance – and thereby unlocks her own gifts. I wanted to reveal both the professional ballroom dance world and the microcosm of Chinatown to my readers.

So much of the novel comes from my own experience. I used to go dancing in Spanish Harlem, just as Charlie does in the book. I went to my interview at the dance studio in the exact outfit Charlie wears: an oversized red dress, a clashing red turban wrapped around her badly-cut hair, and black pumps she has filled in with magic marker to cover their worn patches.

When I was working as a ballroom dancer, my father was ill and my family treated him exclusively with Eastern medicine. I fought to get him to a hospital for diagnostic tests. This struggle between East and West re-emerges in the novel as well, as Charlie’s little sister Lisa becomes sick and their family only wants her to use traditional Eastern healing techniques.

All of these elements are woven into the fabric of the book: a father’s concern for his children, the guilt and love between two sisters, the passion of a young woman discovering her own gifts.

What is the title of your book? Why?

I came up with a plethora of terrible titles, including Heavenly Bodies, which in only two words manages to suggest pornography, science fiction and Chinese people having sex in space. At this new low point, my editor said hastily, “You know, Jean, I think Mambo in Chinatown is perfect and you don’t need to think up any other titles. Really.”

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

There were two clear turning points in my life. The first was when I left science to become a writer, and the second was when I left dance, again to become a writer. I’d already worked in three laboratories in high school and I’d skipped my freshman year when I entered Harvard so that I could get my masters in physics in four years. I was that determined to become a physicist. There is a part of me that still thinks like a scientist. I need to be able to see the structure of my books in my mind. I’m not capable of writing a very messy novel, brilliant as those can be. Although I am often surprised by the twists and turns the creative process takes along the way, I do my best to ensure that the final fictional reality is one continuous, engaging and coherent dream.

The other part of me is the dancer. I was tempted to stay in ballroom for the rest of my life. When I was dancing, I ran into my former Harvard professor, Helen Vendler, at a Seamus Heaney reading and she said, ‘Jean, you must return to the flock.’ Deep down, I knew she was right. However, being a dancer has changed me. Through dance, I rejoice and I grieve; I touch the boundaries of my experience as a woman and a human being. Both writing and dancing are ways of accessing the deepest parts of my soul. So there you have it: I’m part scientist, part dancer, and all writer.

More About Jean Kwok

Jean Kwok immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She won early admission to Harvard, where she held as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia. In between her degrees, she worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer for Fred Astaire Studios. Her debut novel Girl in Translation was a New York Times bestseller, has been published in 17 countries and is assigned in universities, colleges and high schools across the world. Her second novel Mambo in Chinatown is about a young woman torn between her family duties in Chinatown and her escape into the world of ballroom dancing. Jean lives in the Netherlands with her husband and two sons. You can find her on her website, Facebook and Twitter.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

Mambo in Chinatown’s main character falls in love with ballroom dancing despite her family’s concerns – see a description here. Which one of your hobbies or interests would most surprise your friends and family?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Jean Kwok’s novel Mambo in Chinatown. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 10, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (April 9th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Ted Thompson’s novel The Land of Steady Habits. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: The Land of Steady Habits

“Filled with heartache and humor, this assured, compassionate first novel channels the suburban angst of Updike and Cheever, updating the narrative of midlife dissatisfaction with a scathing dissection of America’s imploding economy…With pitch-perfect prose and endearingly melancholy characters, Thompson offers up a heartbreaking vision of an ailing family and country.” – Booklist

A Short Q & A With Ted Thompson

What is the title of your book? Why?

The Land of Steady Habits is actually an old nickname for the state of Connecticut. Supposedly it was given that name somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century because of the moral rectitude of its inhabitants. This bit of trivia was called to my attention by my friend Stuart Nadler, who is a brilliant writer and also a trivia buff who was a contestant on Jeopardy. Anyway, state nicknames have always kind of cracked me up, but this one had all of these lovely ironies when placed in the context of the story I was telling. I knew pretty much the moment I saw it that it was the novel’s title.

What were the seeds of this book?

The book started as a short story, essentially a comedic one-scener about a guy who shows up at his ex-wife’s house on Christmas eve dressed as Santa Claus. Though that premise was kind of broad, and the story didn’t work, I tried for many years to make something of it. It wouldn’t really let me go. Over many drafts that short story grew into a novella, and over many more, into a novel. But the image that wouldn’t leave me alone was always one of this man with a big bag full of presents, ringing the doorbell on his old house, in costume, asking to be let back in. That moment didn’t make it into the final book, but its emotional content informed nearly everything.

Was there a particular moment that this book became its own beast, outside of you?

I’m not sure, since of course everything comes from inside, but there were several moments when the imagination became more robust and I didn’t have to work so hard. One in particular was actually after I had sold the book, and spent many frustrated months revising it. This wholesale revision wasn’t actually called for by my editor—it was self-directed, based on a sense I had that the book wasn’t yet where I wanted it to be—and after spending several weeks rewriting the same scene over and over, I decided to axe almost everything except the first sixty pages, and start again. And once I did that, this interesting thing happened. The whole first draft had all been written from the point of view of single character—it was a very tight book that way, confined to one consciousness over the course of a short time period. But when I went back to the page, I decided to close my eyes and trust the first sentence that came to me. Turned out it was from another character’s point of view—his wife’s. And once that move was made, everything opened up. In a way, she lifted the curse. It took a long time to find my way to that character, but once I did the novel came relatively quickly.

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

I grew up in the place where the novel is set, so more than anything I think it was the sense memories of place and setting. My family moved away from Connecticut many years ago, and I haven’t been back there much since, but I did feel like in writing this novel I was spending time with the frozen marshlands and railroad tracks and sandy train station lots of my youth. So much of writing fiction, for me, is about convincing myself as I go along, which I find to be so much easier if I can tack down my story with details I know are true. Oftentimes, through the drafts, I forget where the details came from, and congratulate myself on my incredible powers of invention—until someone in my family reads it and calls me out.

When did you first know you were a writer?

Tough question. On bad days, I still wonder about this. But the moment I first wanted my work to be taken seriously was probably in high school, when I had decided to quit being a jock and try to write a play. (Identity was a little more fluid back then.) I wrote and directed this thing, which was essentially a pastiche of all the sitcoms I had ingested in childhood, and I still remember the moment the audience laughed at that first joke. It seems silly but it was kind of a revelation: I had communicated something. After that, there was pretty much no turning back.

More About Ted Thompson

Ted Thompson’s debut novel, The Land of Steady Habits, was published by Little, Brown in late March 2014. His stories have appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, Best New American Voices and Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, among other publications. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ledig House, and the Truman Capote Trust. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their dog, Raisin, and is a proud faculty member at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. You can find him on his website, Instagram and Twitter.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

Ted Thompson created a crest for his website that includes his dachshund and glasses – see it here. What two items would you put on your personal crest?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Ted Thompson’s novel The Land of Steady Habits. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 9th, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

About Today’s Book: Astonish Me

“Dazzling . . . Maggie Shipstead’s thrilling second book, Astonish Me, is an homage to, and exposé of, the exhilarating, punishing world of ballet; it’s also a searing rumination on insecurity, secrecy, and friendship . . . Shipstead nails the details of being perpetually en pointe: the adrenaline rush after a performance, the intimate atmosphere of the dressing room, the nagging feelings of inadequacy, the erotically charged and emotionally cruel competitiveness, and the inability to shake perfectionism long after retirement. Like a brilliant choreographer, she has masterminded a breathtaking work of art.”
—O Magazine

A Short Q & A with Maggie Shipstead

What is the title of your book? Why?

My book is called Astonish Me after a famously lofty command (“Étonnez moi!”) issued by Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes, to Jean Cocteau and the rest of the dancers and artists in the company when they were making a new ballet. There are times in the book when the dancer characters are astonished by the artistry of others, and for me, that experience of being undone by the beauty of what someone else has created (a book, a poem, a dance, a painting, a piece of music) is really one of the great pleasures of being alive. There’s something, too, in the title about how even the people we know best remain, to some essential degree, mysterious to us.

What were the seeds of this book?

I’m not a dancer, but I’ve always loved ballet. Back in 2010, I wrote a short story about a disappointed ballet dancer and her academically gifted son and their conflicts with their next-door neighbors. It jumped through twenty years in short sections and didn’t really work. I liked writing about dance, though, and as I tinkered with revising the story, it seemed to want to expand. Once I came up with the idea to introduce the character of Arslan Rusakov, a Soviet defector and ballet superstar, the larger shape became clear. Part of what I love about watching the long-form classical ballets is having the chance to be breathlessly caught up in and carried along by the swell of the drama. This novel is meant to pay tribute to that feeling.

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

Astonish Me covers about thirty years but has a fragmented chronology that loops around to fill in missing pieces of information as needed. I like the airiness of the structure, and I liked how writing it felt like assembling something piece by piece.

Are there any writers featured in this giveaway with whom you have a strong friendship? How did you meet that person? How do you support each other’s work?

I’m lucky enough to have two friends in this giveaway: Courtney Maum and Ted Thompson. In the winter of 2012, I was doing an artist residency in Paris and had just published a story in Tin House at the same time Courtney had written a humor piece for Tin House that I read and thought was hilarious. When I looked her up on Twitter, I figured out she also happened to be in Paris (she lived there for years; her husband is French), and so I sent her some sort of friendship-overture-social-media-message, using the Tin House connection to make myself seem like less of a random weirdo. It worked! She’s my friend now! As for Ted, we overlapped in grad school but didn’t really know each other, which in retrospect is sad. Then we were at Bread Loaf together two summers ago, which breeds friendship like summer camp does, and we became friends. (Oddly, Courtney was also at Bread Loaf then, but we didn’t meet.) I loved—and blurbed—both Courtney and Ted’s debut novels, and I picked a short story of Ted’s for Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading series that should be online soon. The story, naturally, was originally published in Tin House.

More About Maggie Shipstead

Maggie Shipstead is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. Seating Arrangements, her first novel, was a national bestseller and won the Dylan Thomas Prize and the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in many publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, The New Republic, Tin House, VQR, and The Best American Short Stories. You can find her on her website, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

Astonish Me is about life-changing live performance. What’s a live performance of any kind that’s mattered to you?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Maggie Shipstead’s novel Astonish Me. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 8, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

Today (April 11th, 2014 until 8:00 PM ET) we are giving away one signed copy of Caeli Wolfson Widger’s novel Real Happy Family. To enter the giveaway, see the bottom of this post. Click here for full information about this individual giveaway and the 23 other books participating in the OMG! All The Books! Giveaway through May 8th.

About Today’s Book: Real Happy Family

Real Happy Family has been described in reviews as a “page-turner that strikes the balance between humor and heart;” a member of the “Tolstoyan literary tradition, offer[ing] both a scathing social critique and a sympathetic look at relationships and moral indiscretions;” a “sharply funny [skewering] of Hollywood fame-seekers;” and “an unsparing take on damaged family ecosystems [that] makes for compulsive reading.” 

A Short Q & A With Caeli Wolfson Widger

What is the title of your book? Why?

Real Happy Family, because it’s the name of the reality show that provides the backdrop for the core story line.

What were the seeds of this book?

Real Happy Family started brewing shortly after I’d moved from Brooklyn to L.A. and felt like I’d landed on a different planet. I don’t mean this in the typical ‘LA is so shallow and materialistic and NYC is so substantial and thinky’ – I didn’t feel negative or judgmental toward LA, but more fascinated in an anthropological way. The breezy countenances everyone seemed to wear, the ubiquitious vanity, the strange speech patterns (The ‘love you!’s tossed between people who barely knew each other, for example, how all women call everyone ‘honey’ or ‘baby’) flip flops and sparkly painted toes and perky boobs on all women, regardless of age, etc. The casual assumption by so many of the new moms I’d met that they’d take their young kids to auditions. The sense of possibility! Cliched as it sounds, I really felt it, gold-rush style, that maybe my then-1-year-old, COULD become the new face of BabyGap (we went to one audition and left after about 8 minutes).

Around this time, I got pregnant with my 2nd kid and bought an elliptical machine and began to watch reality TV while I exercised in the evening because it pleasantly numbed my brain and passed the time quickly. Particularly the Hills and the Real Housewives series, and I began to wonder about the backstories of this shiny, outwardly vacuous people who seemed to believe their ticket to fame and fortune was just…being themselves. One night I watched Audrina Patridge’s mom have a complete meltdown on TV because she thought Audrina’d been slighted for something or other. And the next morning, when I sat down to write (I’d committed myself to 1,000 words a day no matter what), she was the first topic that came to mind, and I started writing about her. Eventually, she evolved into Colleen, and soon Colleen needed relationships (as well as complexity and compassion), so the other characters emerged from her. So I’d say my early observations of SoCal culture, combined with some reality TV personalities, were the initial triggers for the book.  I wanted to try to get into the psychology of a place & type of people fundamentally different from (and fascinating to) me…

What sentence (or phrase, or idea, or innovation) in this book are you most proud of?

I was surprised by how often I cracked myself up. Honestly, I didn’t know I was funny until humor turned up on the page and started making other people laugh (I wouldn’t trust it if it were only me cracking up)!

Are there any elements in this book that are drawn from your own life?

Not consciously, but I’d say I discovered elements of my own life in my characters after I’d begun to flesh them out. In early drafts, I believed I had a great deal of distance from my characters, and thinking I’d explore them as curiosities, but I ended up feeling much more connected to them — particularly Colleen (the deeply insecure 40something mom) and Robin (the very-secure 30something trustafarian who’s a powerful career-woman but just wants to be a mom) – than I anticipated. This is the sneaky way fiction works:  you set out to stay as far away from yourself as possible and up digging uncomfortably deep, and even revealing facets of yourself indirectly that you’d never be willing to expose in, say, a personal essay. Colleen’s weight obsession, for example, and her chronic insecurity in a crowded room. Robin’s conflicted entrepreneurialism (I’ve held down a day job as a self-employed headhunter for the past 10ish years). Darren (Robin’s filmmaker husband) ‘s artistic purism but low ouput (I didn’t REALLY start writing seriously – daily and with discipline and purpose – until I was 35, despite identifying as a writer and refusing to cultivate a nonartistic career beyond the bare minimum) – I found parts of myself in these characters.

When did you first know you were a writer?

Age 9, lying in bed at night during a thunderstorm, got up and wrote my first poem in my diary, titled The Night Opera (a true masterpiece, obviously), and it felt both like I’d made sense of what I’d been feeling but also that I’d opened the gateway to something more expansive…and I was hooked.

Are there any writers featured in this giveaway with whom you have a strong friendship? How did you meet that person? How do you support each other’s work?

Julia Fierro and I are literary kindred spirits. I met her in a workshop she was teaching. It changed my life. I’m not being dramatic.  I had always considered myself a poet and knew nothing about fiction, and I turned a story in to Julia and she said, ‘You could publish this, you know,’ and she’s been one of my best friends in the world ever since. We went through the process of finding agents and selling our books together, and being able to support each other and commiserate was absolutely crucial to my sanity.

More About Caeli Wolfson Widger

Prior to joining the faculty of Writing Workshops Los Angeles, Caeli Wolfson Widger worked as the assistant director of Brooklyn’s Sackett Street Workshop and taught creative writing at University College London and the University of Montana. Her debut novel, Real Happy Family, was published in 2014, and her recent work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on NPR.  Caeli is a graduate of Wellesley College and holds an MFA from the University of Montana. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband and three children. You can find her on her website and Twitter.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

Los Angeles is an integral part of Real Happy Family and is prominent in its book trailer – view it here. The Los Angeles Times has described the book as depicting the city of Los Angeles as “a superficial veneer [that] belies a more complicated truth.” How would you describe a place where you live (or a place that you love)?

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One winner will win one signed copy of Caeli Wolfson Widgers’s novel Real Happy Family. Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 11, 2014. Read the complete rules. 

About Today’s Book: The Vacationers

Straub’s second novel (Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, 2012) is contained in the two-week vacation of the extended Post family: Franny and Jim, married over 30 years; their teen daughter, Sylvia; twentysomething son Bobby, his girlfriend, Carmen, in tow; and Franny’s best friend, Charles, and his husband, Lawrence. Trading one grand island for another, the mainly Manhattanites arrive in Mallorca with, of course, a few secrets tucked in their literal baggage—and so begin the games that occur above the plane of the Scrabble board. Jim has suddenly left his beloved magazine job, and not everyone knows the circumstances; Sylvia’s excitement to get to Brown might have more to do with leaving home; Carmen wishes Bobby would ask his parents for that favor already; and it’s more than work emails keeping Lawrence searching for a WiFi signal. Straub masters a constantly changing flow of perspectives as readers wonder who will forgive and be forgiven in this sun-soaked, remote paradise. Spongy and dear, sharply observed and funny, Straub’s domestic-drama-goes-abroad is a delightful study of the complexities of family and love, and the many distractions from both. –Booklist Starred Review

A Short Q & A with Emma Straub

What is the title of your book? Why?

The book is called The Vacationers, which is perfect, but it had a different title for its whole life. My editor came up with the title, actually. Now when I look at the cover, I can’t imagine it being called anything else.

What were the seeds of this book?

I’ve been working on this book, in some ways, for years. I started writing about the Post family in 2005, when I started planning out the crazy novel that took place all in one day, with alternating chapters that were flashbacks… hoo boy, was it a big ole mess. Then I went to my MFA and started writing stories, and turned some of the flashbacks into standalone pieces, three of which were in my story collection. It was really lovely to go back to those characters all these years later and know them so well—I wrote this book in a few months, really, but that was only possible because I’d already put in so much time.

Which writers (or books) have made you think about your own writing in new ways?

Jennifer Egan, always. A Visit from the Goon Squad, The Keep, “Black Box.” Hot damn. I couldn’t love her more.

Are there any writers featured in this giveaway with whom you have a strong friendship? How did you meet that person? How do you support each other’s work?

Amazingly, I’m friends with MOST of the writers in this group, in one way or another—Edan and I went to college together, Julia hired me to teach for Sackett Street, Maggie was nice enough to write me a blurb, I know Joanna and Ted and Robin and Megan and Roxane from around the way…it really is a lovely group. I’m happy to support them all in any way I can.

If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you would be? Put another way, what else fills your life besides writing (and how does this influence your writing, in practical or ephemeral ways)?

Cheese eater, cat lover, dress shopper, baby kisser, book reader.

More About Emma Straub

Emma Straub is the author of The Vacationers, Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and Other People We Married. She has written for Vogue, The New York Times, New York, and many other places. She has one husband, one baby, and two cats. You can find her on her website, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook.

Enter Today’s Giveaway!

To enter, answer the following question in the form below:

In The Vacationers, the Post family spends two weeks in Mallorca, Spain. Emma Straub has listed some of her favorite vacation spots on the news page of her website. (Her guidelines: must have excellent baked goods, sunshine, and restaurants that don’t object to one very handsome small child.) What are your favorite vacation spots and why?

One winner will win one signed copy of Emma Straub’s novel The Vacationers.

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Limit one entry per IP address. No purchase necessary. Open to legal residents of the United States, who are the age of 18 or older. Deadline for entry is 8:00 P.M. ET on April 7, 2014. Read the complete rules.