catching up with, Interviews

Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

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Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

What happens after your debut book is published? Would you do anything different for your second novel?

These are the questions I so often want to ask debut authors but never get the chance to unless I bump into them at an event or we cross paths in DMs on social media.

So, Debutiful’s launching a new Q&A to catch up with some of our favorite debuts as they launch and promote their next books.

First up is Ariel Delgado Dixon, whose first book, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was a Debut Debut Book of 2022. Her sophomore book, Sourland, came out in June 2026, and I caught up with her via email for this new series.

Sourland is about two women battling for control of a Northern California farm after its enigmatic owner suddenly disappears, forcing them to confront old rivalries, buried secrets, and the lingering influence of the woman who brought them together.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Last Stampede by EC Dorgan

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See the cover for The Last Stampede by EC Dorgan

EC Dorgan’s The Last Stampede is a surreal, genre-bending literary horror novel about grief, kinship, and reckoning in a dystopian near future. Four Métis strangers find their lives colliding in the aspen country surrounding a prairie city: a dying man haunted by tragedy, a revenge-driven horse woman whose broncos manifest from her arms, a corporate executive desperate to protect his company, and a young woman searching for her place in the world while facing a mysterious illness. When a global tech company begins destroying the natural landscape to replace it with data centres, the connections between the four emerge as they fight for revenge, redemption, and survival.

Dorgan writes weird fiction and horror on Treaty 6 Territory in the Edmonton area. Her work has appeared in The Dark, Augur Magazine, The Ex-Puritan, and numerous anthologies. Named a Writers’ Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2024, she received the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story in 2025. She is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta.

The Last Stampede will be published by House of Anansi on April 27, 2027. It is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Last Stampede, designed by Alysia Shewchuk and forthcoming from House of Anansi. Below, Dorgan discusses the vivid image of a horse woman and her broncos that followed her throughout the writing process, the family photographs that helped inspire the design, and how the finished cover blends Western imagery, the Canadian prairie landscape, and the novel’s surreal, dystopian world.

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Interviews, my reading life

Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

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Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

Anna Heyward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vogue, and more, and studied animal behavior and welfare science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

In Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, Heyward writes about adopting Freddie, an Italian greyhound with severe separation anxiety, and how trying to understand his mind transformed the way she saw her own. It’s a moving meditation on the relationship between humans and animals, what we can truly know about another being, and how much we should try to change those we love.

Heyward answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

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Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.

In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.

ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

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Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

In False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi explores what happens when grief, ambition, and storytelling can’t be separated. The novel follows actor Jal Persad, who, after his mother’s death, begins writing a memoir that places her at the center of Jim Jones’s rise in Guyana. The problem: almost none of it is true. As Jal’s fabricated story gains attention, Farhadi examines the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, and what can be lost when those stories become more useful than the truth.

We asked Farhadi to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could learn about the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

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Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

Kate Riley’s debut book, Ruth, is about Ruth.

Ruth grows up in an insular Christian communist community where private property is forbidden, daily routines are acts of prayer, and questioning the world around her is discouraged. Told in glimpses across her childhood, marriage, and motherhood, the novel follows Ruth as her persistent curiosity collides with a life built on faith, conformity, and holy mystery, asking what it truly means to be happy and to live a meaningful life.

It was one of the titles I wish I’d gotten around to reading last year, but missed. Now, her debut is out in paperback, so we caught up with Riley so she could answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A.

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book list, Recommendations

Eight Books Featuring Not-So-Human Perspectives Recommended by Julie Salmon Kelleher

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Eight Books Featuring Not-So-Human Perspectives Recommended by Julie Salmon Kelleher

There’s a magic to the kind of book that teaches a reader to see the world through another person’s eyes. There’s a double-magic when books take us out of human seeing altogether. It’s a trick that transcends genres: both literary and speculative writers love the challenge of reaching for a foreign understanding. 

My novel The Sea-Glass Shore is about a family of selkies: seal-people who take off their skins to live a human life on land. To write it, I immersed myself in remarkable facts about seals. Their eyes change shape to focus both above and below the water. They have whiskers so sensitive to vibration, they can track a small fish in a murky current. I imagined how a person accustomed to the sensory world of a sea-dwelling hunter would transition to life on land. The selkie people in my story pick up currents in the wind instead of water. They read nearby people through the give-and-take of their breathing. 

On the days when I was trying to think like a seal, I became more conscious not only of what people said to me, but how they sighed when they said it. Reaching for non-human perspectives has helped me understand the powers and limits of human thinking, and maybe even push those limits. Here are eight more books that do the same. 

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

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See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

In her debut novel, The Light in Other Houses, Anna Marschalk-Burns explores motherhood, infertility, desire, and found family. The novel follows Zoe, who returns to her hometown of Minneapolis after years of failed fertility treatments and finds herself drawn into the lives of her new neighbor Danni and her five-year-old daughter.

Marschalk-Burns is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship and the Himan Brown Award. Her short fiction has appeared in SLICE, Joyland, and Literary Hub. Her debut novel is set to be published by Zando on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal The Light in Other Houses’s cover, designed by Lucy Kim and featuring a painting by Jeremy Miranda, along with a Q&A with Marschalk-Burns about its creation.

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News

See the cover for Under a Fur Coat by Sonya Vatomsky

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In their debut novel, Under a Fur Coat, Sonya Vatomsky explores ambition, obsession, folklore, and the uneasy boundary between the natural and supernatural. The novel follows Vivienne, a struggling photographer who travels to a Finnish island and becomes caught up in a mycologist’s search for a mythical bracket fungus.

Vatomsky is a writer whose work has appeared in Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian Magazine. They were shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction Prize in 2024 and are also the author of the poetry collection Salt Is for Curing. Their first novel is set to be published by House of Anansi on March 23, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal Under a Fur Coat’s cover, designed by Alysia Shewchuk, along with a Q&A with Vatomsky about its creation.

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Interviews, my reading life

Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often

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Luke Larkin’s The Unheld is a horror Western set in the haunted Montana Territory, where twelve-year-old Charlie sets out to rescue her father after a nightmarish creature drags him into the wilderness. Joined by an Englishman connected to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman living in exile, Charlie ventures into a landscape populated by strange creatures and supernatural threats. Blending Western grit with horror, The Unheld explores loneliness, alienation, and the complicated bonds that hold people together.

Larkin is a queer writer living in Big Sky Country, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. The Unheld is his debut novel.

Larkin answered our My Reading Life Q&A about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

Continue reading “Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often” →