See the cover of Hombrecito by Santiago Jose Sanchez

Santiago Jose Sanchez‘s debut Hombrecito has long been on our most anticipated book list. Sanchez’s stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, was listed as an Other Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories 2020, and have been published in journals like Joyland , McSweeney’s, and ZYZZYVA.

Hombrecito follows a young boy who leaves Colombia with his family for America without their father and he is left to navigate a new country and culture without a male figure. When he returns years later, he must confront the life he left behind and reveal to his family who he has become. It has been praised by Xochitl Gonzalez, Brandon Taylor, and Garth Greenwell, among others, as an electrifying book with sentences that will leave you speechless.

Debutiful is proud to give readers a first look at Hombrecito‘s gorgeous cover, designed by Grace Han, that puts an artsy spin on pigeons. See the cover below as well get a behind-the-scenes look at how the cover came to be with a short Q&A with Santiago Jose Sanchez.

While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?

Almost ten years ago, when I was a senior in college, I was in love with photography. The images I was making back then—mostly of my mother, Colombia, myself, and my lovers—became my entry points to writing Hombrecito. There was one image in particular referenced within the novel (and which hangs beside my bed) that I imagined as a sort of cover, if not target I wanted to hit in my writing: a double exposure of my mother and me, our faces laid over each other with startling precision so that we almost merged into one.

As I delved into the material of my life, blurring the line between reality and fiction, both in my writing and photography, I kept coming back to formal and moral questions about representation: Where was the line between reality and its representation? How could fiction say something honest about the actual chaos and tyranny of real life? What was mine to represent?

From the outset, I knew I wanted a cover that was figurative and representational. And I knew that I wanted the image—whatever it turned out to be—to expose the artifice inherent in representation.

Hombrecito, in its final form, turned into a self-portrait—a decade-long exposure capturing, but simultaneously distorting, certain aspects of my life. Exploring questions of reality and its representation—first through my photographs, then through my writing—was a journey of discovering what remains in the light and what retreats in shadow, and the slow process of turning fragments of the truth into something more immersive and alive than reality. It’s these tensions that first drew me to photography and that I knew I wanted conveyed in the cover of the book. 

Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your team at Riverhead?

The design process at Riverhead was notably very hands-off, requiring trust and patience. The idea was that allowing the designer to create on their own would lead to a more unique and surprising cover. 

My one request, as we got started, was no black-and-white photograph of a sexy man; the world and I have had enough of these covers. 

As a visual artist, it was really hard to let go of control. However, after my editor told me we were working with Grace Han, and after checking out her covers for Lauren Groff and Chang-Rae Lee, I breathed a little easier. I was in good hands.

In the end, the process was smooth and easy. 

What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?

After seeing a few covers that didn’t quite click, and reconvening with my agent, I decided to send a few scenes over to Laura for her to share with Grace. This was a chance to think about the feeling I wanted distilled in the cover, the feeling at the heart of this project: the wonder and fear of being young. 

The email from Laura arrived just after I’d just finished teaching a class. I was in the bathroom, peeing, when I opened the design that became the cover. It was an instant recognition; I felt it in my entire being. This was the cover for Hombrecito. 

The more I looked at it, the more I fell in love. 

The white space surrounding the pigeons isolated them as in a digital collage. The two pigeons taking flight captured the movement, freedom, and energy I wanted from a cover. The design played with the artifice of photography and the lyricism of a frozen moment—those impulses that had been so on my mind while writing.

The doubling of the pigeons brought to mind Santiago’s relationship with his brother when they first arrived in Miami, and his relationship to Leo, his first boyfriend, with whom he embraces his queerness at the young age of fifteen in the middle of the book—two boys flying through the world on their own. The doubling also evoked the earlier image I’d made in college of my mother and me; how odd and beautiful to find some of that photograph’s DNA here. It felt familiar and strange at the same time. A moment real and unreal. The birds seemed to exist both above and inside of the cover, creating a dynamic dimensionality on the book’s flat surface. The design was simple, sublime, and immersive—this trick of perspective, this play with space and light fired up my brain with all the questions I’d faced while narrating the story of my life through fiction.

How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?

Pigeons and birds appear throughout the book, but I imagine these come from a flashback in the first chapter: Santiago and his brother are walking through a plaza in Ibagué at night after their mother’s disappearance. They stop to scream at the top of their lungs for no reason at all, transporting Santiago back to when they visited the plaza to feed the pigeons as a family. As he follows the father’s orders in his memory, filling his own hands with corn and raising them to the air, the birds flock to him. It’s a rush of feathers and heartbeats that quickly crosses from joy into terror. 

Pigeons are some of the humblest creatures on earth. They adapted to our cities, made our streets their home, existing either unnoticed or as nuisances. The cover transforms this overlooked bird into something striking and undeniably beautiful. This beauty is one of the thematic hearts of the novel—appreciation for the small, humble, and unseen. My narrator—the boy, Santiago, and the “I” that emerges as he grows—grapples with the freedom and loneliness of moving through the world on his own, while navigating the complexities of a fractured family against a backdrop of migration. Like a pigeon after a kernel of corn, Santiago throws himself at life with hunger and desire in this new world. 

When I showed my mother the cover, she reminded me that pigeons were also used as messengers because of their homing abilities. Travelers would tie messages to pigeons they’d brought with them and set them free. The birds, without fail, would find their way back home.

It was one of those happy accidents of meaning. One of those moments that reminds me that images possess a profound power beyond the reach of conscious thought or language. The ever-present desire to return home fills Hombrecito’s pages. That the pigeon became the mascot for this project feels inevitable. 

The image of pigeons mid-flight struck another unexpected chord. Pájaro, the Spanish word for bird, is used as a slur for “faggot” in some Spanish-speaking cultures. Throughout the book, it echoes as a refrain, a word that haunts Santiago and leads to a climactic scene with his father toward the novel’s end. The two birds on the cover—whether a metaphor for a boy navigating his sexuality, returning home, or living under the shadow of a word and its power—have touched me in such a layered and profound way. These two birds are together, taking flight. This resonates with a sentiment at the heart of my life, and one of the most important questions for Santiago in Hombrecito: If all we are is animals—then I want every pleasure, every terrifying one.