Interviews

Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett

by AdamLeave a Comment on Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett
Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett

A debut novel that’s shortlisted for the Booker Prize is a rare coup: with May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry finds herself in the company of Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar), and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain). But it’s a well-established nominee who she credits with inspiring her novel. Reading Percival Everett’s The Trees, which she describes as “batshit” in the best of ways, showed her it was possible to write the kind of genre-bending book she aspired to. 

With May We Feed the King, Perry works in historical fiction but questions memory, research, and truth. A curator is commissioned to arrange rooms for the 750th anniversary of a palace. She avoids looking at her own past by becoming lost in the mysterious legacy of a medieval king. When the anniversary celebration begins, she implores visitors to consider history elastic and make their own meaning from the artifacts in the rooms.

Genre isn’t the only literary norm Perry played with. We connected via email about her choices with plot, white space, and writing in the bath.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Welcome Home, Stranger by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

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See the cover for Welcome Home, Stranger by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Yoojin Grace Wuertz’s Welcome Home, Stranger is a YA novel about family, identity, and the complicated bond between two second cousins raised worlds apart. Yeji grew up in North Korea, while Ellie grew up in North Jersey, and when the two live together in Leonia for a year, they must navigate the histories, expectations, and cultural differences shaping their shared family.

Wuertz is the author of Everything Belongs to Us. Welcome Home, Stranger will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers on May 25, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Welcome Home, Stranger, illustrated by Mozza with art direction by Aurora Parlagreco. Below, Wuertz discusses the cover’s layered depiction of Yeji and Ellie, its play with scale and cultural artifacts, and how the final design captures both the friction and intimacy at the heart of the novel.

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book list

7 Books That Take You Into London’s Hidden World

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7 Books That Take You Into London’s Hidden World

My book, Blood Drunk, has two central characters. One is Freddie Burns, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking young Londoner with the world-weary cynicism of a sixty-year-old vice cop and the emotional intelligence of a toddler. He does his best, but it doesn’t always go very well. The other – sort of – is London itself, or at least a version of it. The book is set in the 1990s, a decade when London faced huge challenges – riots, homelessness, and a level of crime something like 90% worse than today – but also when it began to recover from its long-post war slump; a vast animal emerging from hibernation, cleaning the coal soot off its buildings and blinking in the bright lights of Cool Brittania. London has reinvented itself many times since the Romans, layers of history deposited then fractured by the tectonic forces of technology and money – a place of cracks and fissures under the concrete where all sorts of hidden stories play out in the dark. Here are a few of my favourites.      

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for To Think of a Match by Halee Kirkwood

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See the cover for To Think of a Match by Halee Kirkwood

Halee Kirkwood’s debut poetry collection, To Think of a Match, explores insects, ecology, systemic oppression, and the possibilities of imagining a more just world. Through the collection, insects become both subject and metaphor, offering new ways to think about the human and more-than-human worlds.

Kirkwood is an Indigenous Nations Poets fellow, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and recipient of the James Welch Poetry Prize. Their work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Ecotone, and elsewhere.

To Think of a Match will be published by TriQuarterly Press on March 15, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of To Think of a Match, designed by Adam Bohannon. Below, Kirkwood discusses their fascination with insects, the cover’s vivid iridescent colors, and how its beetles evoke the collection’s invitation to strike a match and imagine something new.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Miracle Cures by Carey Dunne

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See the cover for Miracle Cures by Carey Dunne

Carey Dunne’s debut novel, Miracle Cures, is a darkly funny exploration of wellness culture, pseudoscience, and the things we choose to believe. When fact-checker Nelly begins working for a celebrity wellness magazine, she spends her days investigating dubious health claims until a health scare sends her searching for a miracle cure of her own.

Dunne is a writer and former fact-checker whose work has appeared in The Guardian, The Baffler, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. Miracle Cures will be published by Simon & Schuster on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Miracle Cures, designed by Sarah Flood-Baumann. Below, Dunne discusses medieval medicine, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, and how centuries-old quackery became the perfect inspiration for a novel about our modern search for miracle cures.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Lessons in Attention by Jimin Kang

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Jimin Kang’s debut novel, Lessons in Attention, is an intimate, atmospheric story about disappearance, identity, faith, and belonging. Following Brazilian translator Lua as she searches for her missing friend Toby, the novel moves across continents as Lua confronts what it means to leave homes and loved ones behind while searching for a place to belong.

Kang is a writer whose work explores questions of home, migration, and identity. Lessons in Attention will be published by Tin House on June 22, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Lessons in Attention, designed by Maura Intemann. Below, Kang and Intemann discuss the novel’s recurring water imagery, the geographies that shape Lua’s journey, and how collage became a way to capture a character whose sense of self stretches across places, cultures, and lives.

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book list, Recommendations

7 books that know how to have a conversation 

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7 books that know how to have a conversation 

As a college student, I had a real miracle happen in the form of incidentally ending up in an intro to poetry class with Martín Espada. Learning from Martín changed my life in many directions, but today I’m here to think with you all about a central ethos of his mentorship, that “the purpose of poetry is to communicate.”

Who doesn’t love the good company of a great book, when reading feels like having a conversation? I especially love collections that lean into the everyday, and writers who bring their attention to bear on the seemingly inconsequential, the mundane, rendering it sacred. It’s this admiration that led me to the project of my own book, and it’s why I called that book Small Talk. 

Lately, I’ve been returning to the books that have kept me such good company with new questions: How are these books thinking about and/or with the reader? How are they using form to change what kinds of thinking are possible? Who else is in the room of the poems? What do these poems believe, and how does the poet attempt to communicate that?

For this list, I’ve gathered together a group of writers that talk to their readers in ways that are innovative and permissive; books that changed what I could imagine a book might be capable of doing. In these pages, writers find meaning in a bag of Funyuns, a daughter’s socks at a bowling alley, a monarch butterfly on a wrinkled shirt, a friend eating strawberries, and so much more. 

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Interviews, my reading life

How Little Women and Contemporary Poetry Shaped Poet K.T. Landon

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How Little Women and Contemporary Poetry Shaped Poet K.T. Landon

K.T. Landon’s Abide is a poetry collection about mortality, grief, and the unexpected joy that can emerge from moving through loss. Written over the course of a decade, the poems reckon with the death of Landon’s sister, her own cancer diagnosis, marriage, faith, and memory while finding humor and moments of transcendence in everyday life.

Landon’s poems have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Best New Poets, among others. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.

The poet answered our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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