Debutiful Podcast: Avery Curran discusses Spoiled Milk
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Rachel Knox on Leaving, Longing, and Reclaiming Florida in Anywhere Else
Hiding behind the title of Rachel Knox’s debut, Anywhere Else: Essays on Florida, is a braided set of reckonings, of leaving, longing, and return, asking not just what home is, but who gets to define a place so overdetermined in the national story. Knox’s Anywhere Else resists the easy narratives that so often flatten Florida into caricature. What emerges instead is a place rendered through accumulation—of memory, media, desire, contradiction—where personal history and cultural myth are in constant negotiation. These essays trace not a single arc of departure and return, but a series of recursive encounters with “home,” each one reframing what it means to belong to a place so frequently misunderstood, dismissed, or reduced to spectacle.
Knox writes with an attention that is both intimate and analytical, moving fluidly between lived experience and cultural critique. An anecdote opens outward; a fragment of pop culture refracts a deeper emotional truth; a landscape becomes charged with the weight of history. The essay form suits her precisely because it allows for this elasticity—this capacity to hold multiple temporalities and meanings at once. Florida, in her hands, is neither simply refuge nor aberration, but something far more unstable and generative: a site where identity is shaped through tension, distortion, and reclamation.
What is especially striking is Knox’s refusal to resolve these tensions. Instead, she lingers in them, attentive to the ways narratives about place are constructed and imposed, by outsiders, by institutions, and by those who call it home. In doing so, she restores texture to a landscape often stripped of it, insisting on its complexity without sentimentality.
The conversation that follows extends these concerns, offering insight into Knox’s approach, her investment in the essay as a form, and her commitment to reimagining Florida not as an anomaly or as a meme, but as a lens through which broader American realities come into focus.
Continue reading “Rachel Knox on Leaving, Longing, and Reclaiming Florida in Anywhere Else”Five Books that Search Inside the Haunted House, recommended by Emma Cleary
When I was writing Afterbirth and someone asked me what it was about, I would usually give them the same, succinct answer: it’s a queer literary horror novel about sisters, monsters, and art. Or I might ask, “Do you like horror movies?” It’s a story about a fledgling artist, Brooke, who feels compelled to watch a lot of them, until the horror crawls out of the screen and takes up residence in her life.
I’ve always been interested in what drives us to seek out horror, and there have been numerous books written on the subject, such as Anna Bogutskaya’s Feeding the Monster. One idea is that horror helps us to process our fears inside a container—as Brooke’s ex-girlfriend, a horror cinephile, argues in my novel. The monsters of Afterbirth are capable of shifting the walls of our homes and burrowing deep inside the bodies we inhabit, but I think its most frightening moments happen between people, within our most intimate relationships.
What follows is an eclectic list of books about being in the grip of some other entity—whether by invasion, possession, or a bond we can’t escape. In these stories, intimacy twists into the uncanny, a lover slowly dissolves, the language of a long-dead poet bewitches the mind, and a house swallows up its occupants. Mothers, sisters, wives, lovers—these are the relationships that haunt. There is an emotional and physical weight to being intertwined with the people or things we love, and there’s also a shared sense that we are searching for something—some lost meaning, a ghostly sort of contact—inside the haunted house.
Continue reading “Five Books that Search Inside the Haunted House, recommended by Emma Cleary”The Boyhood of Cain author Michael Amherst is always inspired by JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut
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.
Continue reading “The Boyhood of Cain author Michael Amherst is always inspired by JM Coetzee and Damon Galgut”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.
Continue reading “See the cover for Bloodroom by Kay. E Bancroft”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.
Continue reading “Debut Author Tara Menon Explores Friendship and Grief in Under Water, Spanning Tsunami to Hurricane Sandy”Debutiful Podcast: Casey Scieszka discusses The Fountain
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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: Casey Scieszka discusses The Fountain”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.
Continue reading “6 Books Where Landscape is an Equal Character, recommended by Nancy Foley”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.
Continue reading “Salt Lakes author Caroline Tracey listened to Bright Eyes every night in high school”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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