Interviews, my reading life

The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

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The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

K.W. Oxnard’s The Leg in Question is a collection of fifteen stories exploring the strange, unsettling, and often darkly funny ways our bodies can betray us. Moving from post-World War I New York to pandemic-era Savannah, from Maine to Malaysia, the collection brings doctors and patients together at the uneasy intersection of medicine, mortality, obsession and desire.

Oxnard’s fiction has appeared in Story, Columbia Journal Online, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. Her story “Belle of the Ball” won the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and her work has been recognized by the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest and other awards.

For My Reading Life, Oxnard spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.

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Interviews

Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

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Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

Murder Bites, Mimi Montgomery’s debut novel, is a satire of reality TV, millennial dog culture, and 2020s politics, yet what is surprising is its earnestness. Underneath the surface is a novel about people’s capacity to change and a story relatable to anyone who ever felt like they didn’t belong. In this conversation, Mimi and I talked about character arcs, Carl Hiaasen, and, of course, DMX. 

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

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See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

Lauren Friedlander’s debut novel, Sensual World, is a surreal Midwestern campus gothic about ambition, obsession, and the terrifying lengths we’ll go in the name of art. Seventeen-year-old Bet Cowl escapes her remote Kansas hometown after discovering the manuscript of a supposedly cursed play and earning admission to the infamous acting conservatory founded by its playwright, Una Flood. There, Bet falls into an intense friendship with former child star Helen as the two endure increasingly extreme demands on their bodies, minds, and relationship. Queer, strange, and darkly funny, Sensual World asks what happens when artistic devotion begins to look a lot like self-destruction.

Friedlander is a writer and graphic designer from Kansas who now lives in New York. She is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sensual World will be published by Catapult on March 23, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Sensual World, designed by Victoria Maxfield and art-directed by Nicole Caputo. Below, Friedlander discusses the visual moodboard that accompanied her through eight years of writing, the artistic references that shaped the novel’s strange world, and the uncanny experience of finally seeing her book with a face of its own.

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Interviews

Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

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Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove is a gorgeously written folk horror with a compelling atmosphere of mounting dread. At sixty-five years old, Carwyn is facing the knowledge that the farm his family has owned in the mountains of northern Wales will likely end with him. Rhian, his wife and partner since they were teenagers, had the brilliance to go anywhere and do anything with her life, if only she hadn’t fallen in love with Carwyn, his family, and with working the farm. Mountain life is hard but not harsh – at least not harsh in a way anyone with a rural upbringing wouldn’t recognize – but forest figures some might call myths are never far from the dark crags of this landscape. The perils of sheep farming all seem to come to a head at once, making Carwyn and Rhian fear they might be living under a curse.

For as long as Carwyn can remember, his family’s land has coughed up trinkets from eras past, including a figurine with odd energy which makes him not want to keep it in the house. Then the overgrown lower pasture reveals itself, and Carwyn believes he’s found the secret to saving his farm. Rhian wants to support her husband’s new interest in the field he’s avoided his whole life, but when curiosity descends into obsession, she has to decide whether she can trust this new version of the man she loves.

I’ve rarely felt so engulfed by a reading experience. Even as my fear built over what was to follow, I could not stop turning pages to find out what would become of this couple. Liam and I spoke via email about the parallels between Welsh and Native storytelling, the importance of Welsh voices telling Welsh stories, and what it’s like to be an outsider artist. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews

In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

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In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

Téa Mutonji‘s My Person opens on an ordinary evening that will not stay ordinary: Tania and Margot, best friends of over twenty years, are getting ready to host their monthly dinner party when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore. It is a small sentence that detonates a life. What follows is not a plot in the traditional sense but a slow unraveling — a “rigorous revision of history,” as the novel puts it — in which two women, one lack and the other white, who have loved each other since girlhood are forced to ask what, exactly, they have been to one another all this time.

Set against the frame of a tense, cross-race and class, will-they-won’t-they breakup power dynamics, My Person follows Tania’s meditative, often wry narration as she tries to live loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s world, even as Margot’s old betrayals come into sharper focus. But Mutonji refuses to let anyone play villain or victim. Margot means well — doesn’t she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania simply been blind to the patterns all along? The book keeps that ambiguity alive until its final pages, less interested in assigning blame than in understanding how two people build a shared history — and how brutal it is to dismantle one.

Threaded through the friendship story is an unflinching look at race, class, and privilege, and the quiet, corrosive weight of what is owed between people who love each other unevenly. In the interview that follows, Mutonji speaks about naming the book, writing without villains, and why a friendship breakup felt like the truest container for everything she wanted to explore.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Talented and Gifted by Kelly Kearsley

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See the cover for Talented and Gifted by Kelly Kearsley

Kelly Kearsley’s debut novel, Talented and Gifted, is a funny, sharp look at failure, reinvention, and the strange promises of startup culture. Molly Wells was once the queen of mom blogging—until an ill-advised post about her ex-husband’s affair tanked her career. Three years later, a ghostwriting gig at a buzzy Portland startup that makes apps and assessments for gifted kids offers Molly a shot at professional redemption. But as the company’s money troubles, questionable personalities, and hidden agendas pile up, Molly’s midlife reboot becomes increasingly complicated.

Kearsley began her career as a business journalist before becoming a ghostwriter for Fortune 500 tech and finance companies. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Money Magazine, Forbes, and elsewhere, and she writes the humor newsletter Does That Make Sense? Talented and Gifted will be published by Grand Central Publishing on April 27, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal Talented and Gifted’s cover, designed by Sandra Chiu, along with a Q&A with Kearsley about its creation.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

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See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

Jared Lemus’s debut novel, Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring, is a suspenseful, mythic story about survival, devotion, greed, and the inescapable pull of the past. In the remote Guatemalan town of Huecotenango, outcasts and wanderers have built lives alongside residents with extraordinary abilities, including a woman who can shapeshift into a jaguar, a healer who absorbs the ailments of others, and a young woman indebted to the god of the underworld. When two brothers arrive after a crash on the outskirts of town, their illicit work threatens to disrupt the community and sets its residents on a dangerous collision course.

Lemus is the author of Guatemalan Rhapsody, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Story, and elsewhere. Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring will be published by Ecco on April 20, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring’s cover, designed by Vivian Rowe, along with a Q&A with Lemus about its creation.

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Interviews, my reading life

How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

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How ‘Are You My Mother?’ Followed Leslie Bazzett All the Way to ‘Mia’

Leslie Bazzett is a writer whose fiction has appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. A finalist for a Rona Jaffe Award and recipient of the NER Award for Emerging Writers, she now makes her debut with Mia, a stylish, unsettling work of psychological suspense about reinvention, obsession, and the dangerous allure of becoming someone else.

Set in San Miguel de Allende, Mia follows Sally, an American living in Mexico for a year with her husband and children, after she falls under the spell of Louise, a glamorous and severe older expat. What begins as an intense friendship takes a stranger turn when Louise starts calling Sally “Mia” and introducing her as her daughter. As Sally embraces the possibility of a new identity while hiding the relationship from her husband, the boundaries between performance and reality begin to collapse, turning the novel into a twisted exploration of mothers and daughters, self-invention, and the stories we tell about ourselves.

We asked Bazzett to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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book list

Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

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Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

Feminine rage is a hot term as of late. While it may seem like a timely publishing trend, there’s nothing new or trendy about the concept—except perhaps the prevalence of novels continuing to explore the topic, for which I am very grateful. The brutality of the female experience—the undoing and eventual reclamation of women who have been figuratively crushed under societal pressures, or who face literal harm simply for existing and then respond in kind—is as evergreen as the struggles themselves. My debut novel, Saint Delilah, has a strong dose of female rage. It’s a good for her revenge story that follows a young woman who was tragically murdered by a man who believed a girl like her would never be missed. Delilah returns as a ghost to reclaim what is rightfully hers—an afterlife—and the story does not shy away from the very real danger of being a woman subject to the male gaze. Here are five novels that tell the stories of women who refuse to back down, who go a little rightfully crazy, and who find themselves enraged.

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Interviews

Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers

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Rebecca Wright Stevens on true crime, violence against Indigenous women, and the nonstop daylight of Alaskan summers

In Sisters of the Midnight Sun, Rebecca Wright Stevens has crafted a compelling nonfiction story about the real-life double homicide of two sisters within the Alaskan Iñupiat community. Drawing on her experience as a public defender assigned to one murder suspect, the book is a portrait of a community affected by violence against Native women. The book weaves together personal moments in Stevens’ life with specifics of her work on the murder case. 

Sisters of the Midnight Sun is both a gripping crime narrative and a self-portrait (Stevens declares herself an outsider.) Her descriptions are sharp and vivid throughout. And her depiction of setting is compelling, from courtroom scenes to the Alaskan landscape. The book’s title nods to how the sun can stay out for 24 hours in northern Alaskan summers. Stevens describes it as a “sun so bright it made your eyes wince until you could get behind blackout curtains and hide.” Stevens has written a book that is singular and unflinching.

We spoke via email with Stevens about the years she spent writing Sisters of the Midnight Sun, her inspirations, and the difficulty of placing a book that blends genres. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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