book list, Recommendations

Six Metafictional Novels Recommended by Thomas Elrod

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Six Metafictional Novels Recommended by Thomas Elrod

People are always looking for stories to sweep them away, to help them escape. There’s not inherently anything wrong with that, though sometimes I worry about taking that impulse to an extreme. When does immersion in a story start being harmful, both to the creators but also to the readers, viewers, and fans as well?

My new novel, The Franchise, imagines a fantasy film series that has taken the escapism mantra seriously. Unfortunately, since it’s owned by a growth-obsessed corporation, that means expanding the series beyond the bounds of mere films and into something like The Truman Show: a living set of the films’ world populated with characters acting out stories and scenarios in the world of the franchise (and being filmed). Fans can pay to have their memories altered and then live in this world – truly escape into it. Of course, there’s a cost to that.

I think the impulse to create stories that envelop us entirely is worth a little push back, which is why I always appreciate books that bounce up against the limits of their fictional constructs. These are books that are aware that the story, and the text itself, is not real, but that doesn’t mean that they think the story or the words don’t matter. Indeed, it’s often the case that the more metafictional a book is, the more urgent and serious it takes its mission to tell its story.

Here are some novels that engage with this metafictional impulse in various and often surprising ways.

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Interviews, my reading life

Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

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Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

Hillary Berhman‘s debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In it, characters move through wild landscapes and emotionally fraught relationships as they struggle with isolation, longing, and the complicated ways people try to care for one another. Spanning settings from Seattle to Istanbul, these stories explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection.

We asked Berhman 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

Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

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Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

Chitra’s mind is in Kolkata, India, where she has a house she lovingly built with her late husband. But her physical body is stuck in a power wheelchair — in an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. Because of this, Chitra is in a terrible mood most days. Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay’s debut novel, Chitra Demands to Go Home (out now from Modern Artist Press), follows the 75-year-old Bengali widow as she navigates her new existence after suffering a stroke. 

Chitra, it seems, will stop at nothing to leave this place she refuses to call home. 

This is a story with many themes: cross-cultural tensions, a mother’s immovable expectations for her adult children, friendship, and late-in-life identity. Readers can also expect plenty of humor thanks to the novel’s cantankerous main character. Mukhopadhyay herself was trained as a scientist and has spent much of her career in science communications. But for her book, she was largely inspired by her personal observations as a third culture kid who has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. We spoke with Mukhopadhyay about the demanding and difficult Chitra, humor’s role in this bittersweet, and much more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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News

See the cover for What Kind of Mother by Judy Sandler

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See the cover for What Kind of Mother by Judy Sandler

What Kind of Mother, the debut memoir by Judy Sandler, follows a mother confronting her son’s descent into severe mental illness as what first appears to be substance use disorder evolves into a dual diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As he rejects medication and cycles through alternative treatment programs that ultimately fail him, Sandler reckons with denial, guilt, and the painful realization that she cannot save her son—only he can save himself.

What Kind of Mother will be published on September 8, 2026, by West Virginia University Press.

Sandler’s work has appeared in The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories, Yale University Journal of Medicine’s The Perch, The Atticus Review, Pangyrus, Grown and Flown, The University of Chicago’s The Awakenings Review, among other publications.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of What Kind of Mother, which was designed by Kelley Galbreath, along with a Q&A with Sandler about its creation.

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Interviews, my reading life

Kerri Schlottman, author of Daytime Moon, learned to read from Are You My Mother

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Kerri Schlottman, author of Daytime Moon, learned to read from Are You My Mother

Kerri Schlottman is the author of Daytime Moon and Tell Me One Thing. In Daytime Moon, readers meet Isa, an adrift woman who has a gift of premonition and a knack for tarot.

We asked Schlottman 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 Let All Our Ghosts Depart by Meghana Mysore

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See the cover for Let All Our Ghosts Depart by Meghana Mysore

In Let All Our Ghosts Depart, the debut short story collection by Meghana Mysore, readers follow women and girls of the South Asian diaspora who grapple with belonging, intergenerational trauma, and the surreal inheritances that shape their lives. Blending the speculative with the emotionally intimate, Mysore’s stories follow characters haunted by grief, desire, family, and memory as they search for freedom, transformation, and a sense of self in worlds at once absurd and deeply familiar.

Let All Our Ghosts Depart will be published on September 1, 2026, by West Virginia University Press.

Mysore’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Let All Our Ghosts Depart, which was designed by Elisha Zepeda, along with a Q&A with Mysore about its creation.

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Interviews, my reading life

Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

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Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

Sarah Wang’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Now, her debut novel, New Skin, has hit the shelves at bookstores.

Following a mother and daughter trapped in a toxic cycle of love, resentment, and reinvention, New Skin is a scalding, darkly humorous debut novel about plastic surgery addiction and the false promises of the American Dream. When Linli Feng returns home to care for her estranged mother after another botched procedure, she is pulled into the dangerous world of black-market beauty treatments and exploitative reality television, forcing both women to confront the damage that obsession and survival have inflicted on their lives.

We asked Wang 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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my reading life

Abundance author Hafeez Lakhani wishes he had found The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao earlier in life

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Abundance author Hafeez Lakhani wishes he had found The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao earlier in life

In Hafeez Lakhani‘s debut novel, Abundance, readers meet two generations of a Muslim Indian family in suburban Miami as they grapple with ambition, faith, and the limits of control in pursuit of the American dream. When sixty-year-old Sakeena refuses a life-saving organ transplant, her husband and children are forced to confront their own choices, compromises, and beliefs about fate. Set against the backdrop of contemporary Miami and the pressures of immigrant family life, Abundance explores the tension between destiny and self-determination.

Lakhani was born in Hyderabad, India, and raised in suburban South Florida. Since then, his writing has helped him earn fellowships from PEN America and the Center for Fiction, he’s been recognized twice with a Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Lakhani answered our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could learn the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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Interviews

Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

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Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

What does it cost a family to cross an ocean — and who pays the price for generations to come? That is the quietly devastating question at the heart of Davin Malasarn’s debut novel The Outer Country.

The story begins in Thailand, where two sisters have their lives irrevocably split when their parents make the agonizing decision to send only one daughter to America — the foreign land the family calls “the outer country.” When the choice defies expectation, a wound opens between the sisters that time and distance only deepens.

Years later, one sister’s young son, Ben, becomes the center of the family’s unspoken tensions. When signs of gender nonconformity surface in him, a fateful decision is made that will cast a long shadow over his childhood — and set in motion a story about inheritance, silence, and the slow, difficult work of self-becoming. As Ben grows, he must navigate his queer identity, fractured family relationships, and the weight of a past that no one wants to name, moving between Thailand and Los Angeles and eventually to Stanford.

The Outer Country is a book about what we inherit, what we survive, and what it takes to finally tell the truth.

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News

See the cover for The Younger and Other Stories by Daniel J. O’Malley

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See the cover for The Younger and Other Stories by Daniel J. O’Malley

The Younger and Other Stories, the debut short story collection by Daniel J. O’Malley, gathers haunting stories that trace the moments when ordinary life begins to drift into the uncanny, when circumstances shift, reality dissolves, and the familiar world reveals itself to be far stranger than it first appeared. By turns tender and unsettling, the collection explores the unstable spaces between connection, consequence, and uncertainty in prose that is elemental, precise, and quietly unnerving.

The Younger and Other Stories will be published on April 13, 2027, by Hub City Press.

Daniel J. O’Malley’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Granta, Subtropics, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Younger and Other Stories, which features art by Nancy Friedland, along with a Q&A with O’Malley about its creation.

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