Interviews, my reading life

The Boyhood of Cain author Michael Amherst is always inspired by JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut

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Michael Amherst‘s The Boyhood of Cain originally came out in March 2025. Now, the paperback of the book, which André Aciman called “A powerful, searing tale told by a boy facing the plenitude of life but hemmed in by a world so…ordinary that he can’t wait either to flee it or be drowned in it,” has been released.

We chatted with Amherst a year ago when the hardcover of The Boyhood of Cain came out. Now, we’ve asked him to answer our reucrring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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News

See the cover for Bloodroom by Kay. E Bancroft

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See the cover for Bloodroom by Kay. E Bancroft

Kay E. Bancroft‘s debut poetry collection, Bloodroom, was a finalist for the 2025 Alice James Book Award. It is set for publication on June 9, 2026, from Sundress Publications.

Bancroft poet, editor, educator, and artist based in Cincinnati, OH with an MFA in Creative Writing — Poetry from Randolph College.

We’re excited to reveal the Bloodroom‘s cover, designed by Kristen Camille Ton, along with a Q&A from Bancroft below.

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Interviews

Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy

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Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy

Under Water, the debut novel from Tara Menon, is a compelling exploration of friendship, grief, and the fluidity of both. With two natural disasters – the 2004 tsunami in Thailand that claimed a quarter of a million lives, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012 as it made landfall in New York City – framing the story. 

Throughout the novel, Menon weaves themes of uniqueness and extinction, distillation and expansion, into the language of sea life, flora, and fauna, as well as the beautiful bond between these two young girls. The story also deftly explores the relationship between the consumer and the consumed, and how we live as both, with varying degrees of awareness and complicity. 

I spoke with Menon about her writing background, writing her debut, and how the structure came to be.

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book list, Recommendations

6 Books Where Landscape is an Equal Character, recommended by Nancy Foley

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6 Books Where Landscape is an Equal Character, recommended by Nancy Foley

Deep landscape, symbolic landscape, landscape imbued with uncanny qualities—this is the foundation for the kind of story I love, one that uses earth’s time and space to build its magic. Below are six books that I return to often for inspiration and for pleasure. 

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Interviews, my reading life

Salt Lakes author Caroline Tracey listened to Bright Eyes every night in high school

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Salt Lakes author Caroline Tracey listened to Bright Eyes every night in high school

Caroline Tracey‘s debut book, Salt Lakes: An Unnatrual History, follows the writer and geographer across four continents as she documents the beauty and alarming decline of the world’s salt lakes, from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the remnants of the Aral Sea. Blending travel writing, environmental reporting, and memoir, Tracey explores the people, ecosystems, and histories tied to these fragile waters while reflecting on her own journey toward queer love and a sense of home in a world shaped by ecological change.

We asked Tracey to answer 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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News

See the cover for We Are the Underlings by Doretta Lau

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See the cover for We Are the Underlings by Doretta Lau

Doretta Lau, known for her breakout short story collection debut, How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?, is back with her debut novel. Coming on October 14, 2026 from House of Anasi, We Are Underlings is about a grieving young marketing employee at a macabre theme park devoted to death and the afterlife who must help program her mysteriously deceased boss’s reanimated corpse to keep the park’s grand opening on schedule, forcing her to navigate corporate absurdity, workplace necromancy, and a string of suspicious deaths among her coworkers.

The book is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover designed by Alysia Shewchuk below, along with a Q&A with Lau about how it was created.

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News

200 Monas author Jan Saenz is reading a smorgasbord of books

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200 Monas author Jan Saenz is reading a smorgasbord of books

Jan Saenz is a Houston-based author, poet, and educator whose debut novel, 200 Monas, is a riotous adventure that oscillates between feeling like a panic attack and getting a stomach ache from laughing so much. Pitched as being for fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda, Saenz follows Arvy Keening, a college senior who discovers a stash of a powerful pleasure-inducing drug in her dead mother’s closet and is given 48 hours by two dealers to sell all 200 pills or die, sending her and the campus dealer Wolf on a frantic, chaotic race through their college town that forces Arvy to confront buried grief, risky desires, and the strange ways people cope with loss.

We asked Saenz to answer 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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Interviews

Antiquating the Self: An Interview with Antediluvian Poet Kameryn Alexa Carter

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Antiquating the Self: An Interview with Antediluvian Poet Kameryn Alexa Carter

Kameryn Alexa Carter is a Black poet and the founding co-editor of Emergent Literary, an online journal for the work of black and brown artists. Her work has appeared in Bennington Review, Phoebe Journal, Torch Literary Arts, The Best American Poetry, Portable Gray, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 Pushcart Prize winner and is a poetry student in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan. She is the author of New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh. Her debut poetry collection, Antediluvian, which was born in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, explores what it means to go within, literally and figuratively.

In a virtual chat, I talked to Carter about how this collection came to be, discerning between the author and the speaker of the work, and what writing life looks like.

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writing

Read an excerpt from Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

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Read an excerpt from Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin

The following is an excerpt from Strange Girls by Sarvat Hasin. She is a novelist and dramaturg from Pakistan who currently lives in London. She received her masters in creative writing from the University of Oxford and has published three award-winning and bestselling novels. Her next novel, Strange Girls, is her US debut.

Strange Girls is about two estranged friends who are forced to reunite over one feverish weekend and reckon with the choices that tore them apart. It is now available from Dutton.

You can listen to an audiobook excerpt of the book at the bottom of this article. The audiobook is available for purchase here.

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