Interviews, my reading life

Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

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Leila Renee was shaped by Toni Morrison, Goosebumps, and The Phantom Tollbooth

Leila Renee is a writer whose fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and a Fulbright Award, and an MFA graduate of Syracuse University, she now makes her debut with Soft Spots, a darkly funny, emotionally incisive novel about family estrangement, obsession, and the difficult work of forgiveness.

Soft Spots follows recent college graduate Robin Clarke after she flees her abusive family for a teaching job in South Bend, Indiana. As Robin becomes increasingly consumed by her dysfunctional school, her seemingly perfect roommate, and the possibility of reconciliation with her ailing father, the novel explores memory, self-sabotage, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

We asked Renee to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

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Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

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 Please Don’t Touch the Body, Emily Doyle delivers eleven inventive, genre-bending stories that explore the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and strange absurdities of modern life. Moving effortlessly between the surreal and the deeply human, the collection follows characters searching for agency, intimacy, and belonging—from a woman reclaiming herself through an anonymous advice column to Ronald Reagan reincarnated as a puppy and a young woman untangling the expectations of her religious upbringing from her own desires. By turns funny, unsettling, and emotionally resonant, Please Don’t Touch the Body announces Doyle as a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction. Doyle is also the author of the forthcoming novel Encounter. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and she has received numerous honors, including the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participant Scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Doyle takes readers inside her debut short story collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Untranslatable by Lara Vergnaud

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See the cover for Untranslatable by Lara Vergnaud

Untranslatable, the debut memoir by Lara Vergnaud, traces the intersections of language, identity, and everyday life through the eyes of a literary translator. As Vergnaud brings novels across linguistic and cultural borders, she navigates her own experiences with illness, infertility, marriage, and the lingering sense of unbelonging shaped by a life between countries and languages. Weaving together personal reflection with the art of translation, the memoir explores what it means to remain invisible while giving voice to others, and how language can both reveal and obscure the self.

Untranslatable will be published on February 16, 2027, by Catapult and is available for preorder now.

Lara Vergnaud is a writer and literary translator specializing in North African literature. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Words Without Borders, and she has translated more than a dozen novels, including The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Born in Tunisia, raised in the United States, she now lives in southern France.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Untranslatable, designed by Victoria Maxfield with art direction from Nicole Caputo, along with a Q&A with Vergnaud about its creation.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Notifications On by Emily Holland

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See the cover for Notifications On by Emily Holland

In her debut poetry collection, Notifications On, Emily Holland explores queer longing, digital intimacy, and the complicated ways technology shapes modern relationships. Through poems that capture the exhilaration and ache of texting, dating, and yearning in an always-online world, Holland examines what it means to seek connection when our phones are never out of reach.

Holland is the Executive Editor of Poet Lore and a genderqueer lesbian poet whose work has appeared in numerous publications. Their debut collection, Notifications On, will be published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House on January 26, 2027. It is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal Notifications On‘s cover, designed by Emily Fussner, along with a Q&A with Holland about its creation.

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Interviews

Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name

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Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name

All That’s Unseen by Emilee Hackney is a powerful coming-of-age memoir, detailing the author’s upbringing in the Appalachian mountains: her radical church background, her family’s struggles with poverty, and the soaring mountains that inspire awe yet seem to keep people from ever leaving the region. As a teenager, Emilee is ensnared in the Pentecostal church (later called a “cult” by her friend) and almost marries a predatory older man, Sam, who uses their shared religion to control her. When she finally breaks away from the church—and from Sam—and attends Harvard, what could be a victorious escape becomes, instead, a new series of trials. Feeling like an outsider in Cambridge, she grows depressed, then turns to sex work and a series of relationships to ease her loneliness. It is only when—bristling at the negative stereotypes she encounters at Harvard about Appalachia—Emilee begins writing that she is able to find her own voice and to reconcile her ambiguous feelings about where she comes from.

Told in elegant prose, All That’s Unseen is a fascinating, thought-provoking memoir that interrogates questions of faith, family, agency, and belonging.

I spoke with Hackney over Zoom. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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Interviews

How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

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How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

The lives of two families collide in a most intriguing and shocking way in Andrea Uptmor’s darkly delightful debut novel, The New People. Faced with foreclosure and falling victim to the ruse of a real estate scammer, Charlotte and Dirk Deniison lose the place they called home faster than they can gather their belongings. The new owners, Emma and Rachel, settle into the house and what should’ve been a new start to an easy new life, only to discover that things aren’t always what they seem. The New People is a deeply moving novel that explores themes of love, loss, and community, and what it really means to feel at home.

Andrea Uptmor is a writer, editor, and a producer on the Taking Charge website at the University of Minnesota. As a content developer at the Center for Spirituality & Healing at the university, Andrea has been a part of a team that launched many online learning modules for healthcare professionals, students, and the general public on the topics of integrative nursing, wellbeing, resilience, and integrative therapies. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Master’s Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her family. The New People is her debut novel.

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Interviews

The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

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The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

There’s a distinct thrill in reading a novel that makes you feel seen, mocked, and entirely transfixed. Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed does exactly that, delivering a sharp-witted and offbeat tale of obsession that I devoured in less than twenty-four hours. Adam of Debutiful calls the novel “sad, weird, and horny,” and I imagine most readers will relate to Astrid, the novel’s endearingly neurotic heroine, as she projects her literary and romantic obsessions onto real people.

I had a blast chatting with Buehler about the glorious voyeurism of autofiction, giving yourself permission to drop out of a PhD program, navigating the relentless pressure to produce, and the refreshing collaborative spirit of the international translation community.

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Interviews, my reading life

Avigayl Sharp is bad at writing book lists… but will give you a Damn Good Writing syllabus

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Avigayl Sharp is bad at writing book lists… but will give you a Damn Good Writing syllabus

Avigayl Sharp is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. A former writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an MFA graduate of the Michener Center for Writers, she now makes her debut with Offseason, a novel as intellectually fearless as it is emotionally unflinching.

Offseason, which was longlisted for the 2026 First Novel Prize, follows a fiercely observant yet deeply unreliable narrator teaching at an elite girls’ boarding school, where obsessive lectures, messy entanglements, and unresolved trauma blur the line between memory and self-mythology. By turns darkly funny, provocative, and psychologically incisive, the novel examines the stories we tell ourselves about pain, identity, and whether art or love can ever rewrite the past.

We asked Sharp to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

Continue reading “Avigayl Sharp is bad at writing book lists… but will give you a Damn Good Writing syllabus” →