Excerpt from American Fantasy by Emma Straub, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He looked approximately her age; it was hard to tell in the dark. The man put his hand on one of the playing card's lower backs, and together they swayed back and forth in time to Kenny Rogers's "The Gambler." He didn't look like someone's husband, and he didn't look gay. What a concept, to be a straight man alone on a cruise like this! Annie felt a small laugh tumble out. She hadn't had sex with anyone after Chris—honestly, she hadn't even wanted to. Annie hadn't had sex with Chris in two years! It wasn't that she wanted to sleep with Mr. Beer Pong—she didn't—but for the first time all year, Annie thought, Maybe. She was a woman sitting at a bar, looking across at a man. It didn't matter that he wasn't her type and that he was dressed as a binge drinking game played by college students. It was a possibility. Annie felt like a small door somewhere inside her was creaking open on rusted hinges.

It was all there suddenly—her first kiss with George Bellingham in the middle school bus parking lot. The first time Jamie Johnson felt her up in his parents' basement and how quickly he yanked his hand out of her shirt when his mother opened the door. When a boy had licked her neck at a party during the first week of college, a stranger! Her first orgasm, Jake Hutchison. Oh, she had loved him. Not him him—she'd hardly known him, really—but Jake had been so handsome, just the most handsome person she'd ever seen naked, and he'd done that for her. It was almost too much to bear, even then, like some sort of Make A Wish program, despite the fact that he'd quickly ditched her for a girl with pierced nipples. Annie thought about her first real boyfriend, Clarence Brown, who had been so kind to her, he'd made her a crossword puzzle from scratch, he'd written her songs on his ukulele. She tried to remember the reasons she'd broken up with Clarence—he was a hacky sacking hippie and lived in a co op on campus, he loved the Grateful Dead and smoked pot out of a tiny glass one hitter every night before he went to sleep. He had seemed too messy for her then, but maybe she could have used the messiness, incorporated it into her system. She could have married Clarence, and maybe she should have. She'd waited to get married, and look what good that had done. Annie didn't want to think about her husband, and so she didn't. He wasn't anywhere near these memories. These were first—these were just for her. Boy Talk had been there too, though. Lurking in those early feelings, putting words to what she wanted to feel. Words she wanted someone to sing to her.

DJ Pancake was already deep in his set, and even before the Kenny Rogers, Annie had heard other songs that had game in the title: Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game," Backstreet Boys' "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)." Talkers could be counted on to sing along to songs by other boy bands, it seemed, and for a second, Annie wondered whether these women were the type to go on other boy band cruises too, if they split their affection. Claudia had had a passing interest in One Direction when she was in middle school, and Annie had been delighted to relive the joy of having a favorite, of learning tiny facts about people you would never meet. Annie wondered if her predilection for Boy Talk had been living dormant in her body, the way chicken pox stayed quiet for decades and then bloomed into shingles. Annie didn't feel like she was blooming, exactly, but she did feel the way she'd felt when she and Chris and Claudia were on vacation in France, several decades after her most recent French class, finding certain vocabulary words swimming back to her from some deep folds in her brain.

Maira tapped Annie on the arm and pointed. Above them, on the balcony, a thick bodied middle aged Black man in a baseball hat gave someone a fist bump and then walked down the stairs.

"That's their manager, Bobby," Maira said. "I could introduce you later. I have his email address too. [email protected], ha! Can you believe it?" She set her drink down and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Bobby! Bobby!" He looked over to where they were sitting and gave a point and a nod. Maira flushed with satisfaction. "Last year, I saw him at the airport afterward. He was so tired, he said."

Excerpted from American Fantasy by Emma Straub. Copyright © 2026 by Emma Straub. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.