See the cover for Extinction Capital of the World by Mariah Rigg

Mariah Rigg‘s debut story collection, Extinction Capital of the World is one of Debutiful’s most anticipated debut books of 2025. The ten-story collection is set in present-day Hawai’i, weaving together tales of love, yearning, and sorrow. They offer a glimpse into land shaped by colonization and are odes to a breathtaking ecosystem constantly at risk of destruction.

The debut story collection is set for an August 5, 2025 publication from Ecco Books and is available for pre-order now!

Debutiful is ecstatic to offer readers a first look at the Vivian Lopez Rowe-designed book cover, provided to us by the publisher. Take a look below and read a Q&A with the author about how the book cover was designed.

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

When I first met my editor, Rachel Sargent, I joked that Ecco could do whatever they wanted with my cover, as long as it wasn’t of palm trees. We laughed about it over Zoom, but I was serious. Extinction Capital of the World is a love letter to the place that raised me, and because of this I wanted the cover to be indicative of the Hawaiʻi of my childhood, rather than the one marketed to outsiders through the extractive tourist industry, which relies on bastardized and exploited imagery of the Hawaiian Islands. 

To be honest, I have a hard time thinking in images. I’m not sure if you remember how, a few years back, everyone was talking about whether or not the voice in their head spoke when they were thinking. I don’t have a voice. My thoughts lean more toward the abstract. When I write, I think about the feeling of being inside the body that I’m writing from or to more than how the character I’m writing looks. The same went for the cover of my book—I had an idea of what it would feel like when the right one was in front of me, but not how, specifically, it would visually manifest.

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

Finding a single image that encapsulates an entire book—especially a short story collection, which holds so many universes—is really freaking daunting. I knew, going into design, that I was leaning toward natural imagery. I wanted something that told a story while also being grounded in place, something simple yet striking, and, as time went on and I started to see cover sketches, I realized I wanted to work within the color scheme of red, black, and green. 

Vivian Lopez Rowe is such a rockstar designer. I was a fan of her work long before we got to work together—her covers for Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang and Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Bite by Bite are both stunning, and were in the selection of comps I sent when we started to brainstorm. We went through multiple rounds of covers, and, all in all, Vivian came up with four options, all nuanced and digging into different aspects of the book’s themes. I’m grateful for her patience and to be read so closely by her. 

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

I cried. The fourth and final cover was a surprise. I’d thought we were going in a different direction, focusing more on the collection’s interrogation of militourism in Oceania. I really liked that cover, and thought it had the story element we wanted, but the jewel-toned color scheme, the boldness of the single image, and the type of the finalized cover absolutely blew me away. It felt like the dream I hadn’t been able to put into words. 

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

The cover of the book depicts the branch of a wiliwili tree, complete with red-orange blossoms and a pod opening to reveal red seeds. On the title perches a gall wasp. First found on Oʻahu in 2005, the parasitic gall wasp soon spread throughout Hawaiʻi, infecting and killing thousands of wiliwili trees. Many thought the wiliwili would go extinct. I grew up swimming at Kāhala Beach, where wiliwili grew in front of mansions bought for tens of millions from locals and left empty by outsiders. I watched those trees die, and though I was too young to process the extent of that loss, I remember how my mom cried when they pulled those wiliwili from the earth. 

While gall wasps continue to damage and kill these native trees, the wiliwili still lives. Scientists are working to protect the wiliwili, which are culturally significant in many ways, their wood shaped into waʻa and surfboards, flowers used for medicine and lei. As one of the most geographically isolated places in the world, Hawaiʻi’s ecosystem is extremely vulnerable, and every time a new species is introduced to the Islands—which happens often under settler colonial occupation—it has a ripple effect. 

On its face, the cover seems simple, one-dimensional, but it speaks to the collection’s larger themes. When people ask me what it was like to be born and raised on Oʻahu, I often say that it was like growing up in a small town that you couldn’t drive out of. My family has lived as settlers in the Hawaiian Islands for four generations, and growing up I couldn’t leave the house without running into someone I knew. There was claustrophobia in this, but also comfort, to be known and to know a place and the people that lived in it so deeply. Writing Extinction Capital of the World was an exercise of reaching for this feeling. Because of this, the collection is linked through both place and character. Though the stories range from domestic horror to queer love stories to eco fiction and break up texts, throughout there’s a sense of interdependence, both in the pressing in of the natural world and also how the stories and characters continue to call back to one another. I feel lucky to have a cover that, to me at least, holds all of this.