Wesley Straton is a writer and bartender based in Brooklyn. She writes fiction about found families, alienation, and how where we live shapes who
we are. She studied fiction at Brooklyn College, where she received the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award and served as an editor for the
Brooklyn Review. Her fiction has appeared in
Glimmer Train and has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize, and she has written about international bar culture for
Roads & Kingdoms,
GQ, and
Difford’s Guide.
The Bartender’s Cure is her debut novel.
At Electric Lit Straton tagged
seven "compelling, magnetic bar personalities" in literature, including:
The Night Shift by Natalka Burian
The protagonist of Natalka Burian’s upcoming novel is a sort of classic accidental bartender. After leaving her more traditional job working for a successful psychotherapist, Jean Smith takes a 
job at Red and Gold, a divey bar in early-aughts Manhattan where the nights consist of drunk hipsters and hundreds (maybe thousands) of vodka-sodas. Jean is a newbie, and we see her struggle behind the bar as all newbies do, but she’s hardworking and stubborn, which I respect. And at any rate, The Night Shift isn’t really about the bar—it’s about the nighttime world that bar work introduces Jean to, with its colorful characters and mysterious shortcuts: strange passageways through space and time that are much more sinister than they seem. Jean is a classic reluctant hero type, and Burian weaves together her painful past and troubled coming-of-age with a riveting, high-stakes mystery.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
we are. She studied fiction at Brooklyn College, where she received the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award and served as an editor for the Brooklyn Review. Her fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train and has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize, and she has written about international bar culture for Roads & Kingdoms, GQ, and Difford’s Guide. The Bartender’s Cure is her debut novel.
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