Interviews, my reading life

Ankur Thakkar Reads for Voice, Structure, and Reinvention

by AdamLeave a Comment on Ankur Thakkar Reads for Voice, Structure, and Reinvention

Ankur Thakkar’s Blow Yourself Up follows Arjun and Payal, two high school sweethearts whose lives diverge as the internet transforms around them. While Payal rises through New York’s influencer economy, Arjun finds himself moderating the darkest corners of the same social media platform. Spanning eight years, the novel explores creative ambition, identity, love, and what we sacrifice in the endless pursuit of being seen.

Thakkar is a writer and multimedia artist whose stories have appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. A 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, he has also exhibited artwork at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai.

For My Reading Life, Thakkar spoke with Debutiful about discovering The Mahabharata as a child, the novel that inspired him to begin writing Blow Yourself Up, and the diasporic writers who helped shape his work.

Continue reading “Ankur Thakkar Reads for Voice, Structure, and Reinvention” →
book list

Five Books That Center Bodegas, Recommended by Amaris Castillo

by AdamLeave a Comment on Five Books That Center Bodegas, Recommended by Amaris Castillo

When I’m not in the comfort of my own home, the bodega feels like the next best thing. All my life, I’ve recognized bodegas – these small owner-operated convenience stores – as community anchors. They always provide the essentials, and something more. In here, stories are abundant, its customers a carousel of characters. 

My debut book, Bodega Stories, follows the people who orbit my parents’ bodega in St. Petersburg, Florida, with interwoven stories from my parents’ beginning as bodega workers in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of a year, I made countless visits to the store to see what I could gather about this place, what I could observe. And what I found was a portrait of seeking home.

Whether you call them something different where you live, bodegas have long proven to be integral parts of the communities they serve. And they’ve been the source of inspiration behind many books and other works of art. Here are five books that I have enjoyed that are related to the bodega.

Continue reading “Five Books That Center Bodegas, Recommended by Amaris Castillo” →
Book Covers, News

See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander

by AdamLeave a Comment on See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander
See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander

Omer Friedlander’s The House in Talbiya is a multigenerational novel following two families, one Israeli and one Palestinian, connected by a house in Jerusalem. Spanning a century, the novel moves from Prague and Jerusalem to Ramallah, Berlin, and New York, exploring diaspora, exile, loss, and the longing for home.

Friedlander is the author of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. He was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Tel Aviv, and now lives in New York City. The House in Talbiya will be published by Random House on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The House in Talbiya, designed by Rachel Ake. Below, Friedlander discusses the paintings that inspired the cover, the significance of its house and bird imagery, and how the final design captures the novel’s fragmented layers of memory, displacement, and home.

Continue reading “See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander” →
Book Covers, News

See the cover for Gold in the Furnace

by AdamLeave a Comment on See the cover for Gold in the Furnace
See the cover for Gold in the Furnace

Kathleen McNamara’s Gold in the Furnace is a debut story collection exploring life at the edges of reality in the modern American West. Across landscapes shaped by fire, flood, and snow, McNamara’s characters confront addiction, paranoia, grief, climate disaster, and the strange places where the natural and supernatural collide.

McNamara’s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Gold in the Furnace, winner of the EastOver Press Prize for Debut Story Collection, will be published February 23, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Gold in the Furnace, designed by Beste M. Doğan. Below, McNamara discusses her desire for a dreamlike cover, the influence of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons in One Head, and how classic art came to capture the collection’s dark, surreal, and occasionally playful vision of the American West.

Continue reading “See the cover for Gold in the Furnace” →
inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing

by AdamLeave a Comment on Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing
Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing

What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.

In The Body of the Thing, Karishma Jobanputra delivers a lyrical and visceral collection exploring the hierarchies that shape women’s relationships with their bodies and with one another. Moving from first loves and sexual awakenings to motherhood, miscarriage, illness, caregiving, and death, the stories examine what happens when women’s bodies are desired for their beauty and youth, dismissed when they become ill, or valued for what they can provide to others. Set across Manhattan, Italy, coastal Maine, and London, The Body of the Thing is a fluid, sensual, and fearless examination of what it means to look at and live in the female body, in all its complicated realities and wonders. Jobanputra is a British-Indian writer based in London and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program. Her work has been listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction. The Body of the Thing is her first book.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Jobanputra takes readers inside her debut short story collection, The Body of the Thing.

Continue reading “Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing” →
Book Covers, News

See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed

by AdamLeave a Comment on See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed
See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed

Yasmin Adele Majeed’s debut novel, Side Streams, is a polyphonic story about family secrets, queer identity, art, and the silences passed between generations. Growing up between her mother’s Filipino American roots and her father’s tight-knit Pakistani American community in the Bay Area, Aliya Amjad becomes fascinated by the mysteries her mother refuses to explain, including an art installation dedicated to an unknown woman. Decades later, Aliya reconnects with her childhood friend Samir, and together they begin untangling the secrets their parents kept and questioning whether silence protected their families or simply kept them apart.

Majeed is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2025, Narrative, Guernica, and Joyland, among others.

Side Streams will be published by Little, Brown on March 30, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Side Streams, designed by Grace Han with art direction by Keith Hayes. Below, Majeed discusses wanting a cover grounded in the California Bay Area, the Diego Rivera mural that helped inspire the novel, and how the final design captures the beauty, friction, and wonder of trying to turn an artistic vision into something tangible.

Continue reading “See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed” →
Interviews

Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

by AdamLeave a Comment on Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer
Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers is an unflinchingly honest, wholly unique portrait of a sister left behind, charting the messy unraveling of a loved one’s addiction and the complicated search for acceptance in the aftermath. In the summer of 2015, Bowers’s beloved older sister, Sasha—an Ivy League-educated social worker—was found dead in her car from a fentanyl overdose. Stricken with grief and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Bowers armed herself with Sasha’s cell phone and began to investigate her sister’s secret life to answer the nagging questions she couldn’t shake: Who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? How did they know each other? Did the dealer really know Sasha in the way she deserved to be known?

Part epistolary, part mystery, part family history, part love letter, part diary, and part personal reinvention, Dear Dealer is an unputdownable homage to her sister and a reckoning with the steep cost of addiction and the way tremendous loss remodels one’s sense of self. 

I spoke with Bowers about her evolution from private writer to published author, avenging her sister’s death the best way she knew how, and what she’s learned from the processes of writing, publishing, and living the ending in real-time. 

Continue reading “Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer” →
Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

by AdamLeave a Comment on See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim
See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s The Ninth Island is a poetry collection about displacement, inheritance, and the search for home, following his family from Hawaiʻi to Las Vegas while reaching across generations to his Chinese American great-grandmother.

Yim is a poet and teacher whose work explores family, place, and the forces that shape Hawaiʻi and its diaspora. The Ninth Island will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on February 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Ninth Island, designed by Alex Wolfe with photography by Patrick Nevada. Below, Yim discusses images of Hawaiʻi, Las Vegas’s culture of facsimile, and how an empty pair of car seats came to capture the book’s themes of absence, longing, and displacement.

Continue reading “See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim” →
Interviews

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

by AdamLeave a Comment on If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson
If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different. 

Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow. 

Continue reading “If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson” →
News

Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

by AdamLeave a Comment on Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort
Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2026 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers the chance to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity of their first or second major book publication.

Continue reading “Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort” →