It’s a daunting task to recommend books to someone. What’s their taste, their mood, how do they feel about certain genres? Countless other questions run through my head. So, instead of asking writers to give me recommendations on the spot, I’ve asked them to share books they love. No other qualifications. Just hit Debutiful readers with a book (or a few) they love and think readers will also love. And, boy, did they deliver!
Here are March’s recommendations, which Debutiful’s favorite writers guarantee you’ll love to read outside as the weather gets nicer.
Puloma Ghosh, author of Mouth
I’ve always been an absolute sucker (haha) for a vampire novel but this one reinvigorated the genre for me. The first part of Thirst follows an insatiable vampire who has only three interests: food, sex, and survival. Yuszczuk’s vampire is not overly sentimental, existential, or romantic; she is the creature at its most animalistic, void of empathy, concerned only with her own pleasure and self-preservation. The city of Buenos Aires evolves around her, death everywhere in its transformations. The second part focuses on a human woman who feels alone in the face of her mother’s slow death, and becomes obsessed with the vampire upon discovering her. This book is everything a vampire novel should be: horny, violent, and nihilistic.
Rebecca Turkewitz, author of Here in the Night
Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella My Death is a masterpiece: claustrophobic, enthralling, unsettling, and bold. It has been stuck in my mind since I devoured it in one sitting last August. It opens as the unnamed narrator, a grieving writer who hasn’t been able to work, rediscovers a favorite author from her youth, Helen Elizabeth Ralston. Ralston’s literary career was overshadowed by the drama surrounding her affair with a famous older male painter. The narrator decides to write a biography of Ralston, and is surprised to learn that Ralston is still alive. But, from their very first meeting, things seem to be amiss. Small things, at first: an eerie similarity between Ralston’s short stories and the narrator’s personal memories, a provocative painting that elicits a disproportionate emotional response, Ralston’s peculiar omniscience. But the novel casts an absorbing spell, and even these small occurrences create a grating tension that builds and builds to one of the best endings I’ve ever read. Nothing too overtly scary happens in this book, and still, when I went into my dark basement to collect my laundry after finishing it, I ran back up those stairs two at a time.
Gina María Balibrera, author of The Volcano Daughters
Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores opens with a torrent of rain compared to falling slabs of ham, and soon we meet the badass sisterhood of survivors of a feral capitalist near-future that is both strange and attentively, hauntingly similar to the present tyrannical unraveling of our world. With each fragrant, neon image, I have the sense of Flores refolding and reinventing the shape a book can take, turning his into a prismatic “halceamadon” (a specially folded and coded paper, passed hand to hand, used to share stories in the book-banned world of Brother Brontë. ) Here is an absolute tesoro. And for all those folks who say they can’t read a dystopia now, I’ll tell you that this one transcends any notion of genre, and it’s brimming with radiant, punk-rock, tía-powered hope.
Laura Warrell, author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
Like a lot of writers, I teach undergraduate English classes so I’m always searching for texts that will resonate with my students and stir their steadily waning interest in fiction. In 2024, I read Ananda Lima’s debut collection, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, about, among other things, a writer’s strange and sexy lifelong relationship with the devil. This year, I returned to one of the stories, “Antropófaga,” thinking it might be a strong addition to my syllabus because it follows a woman who eats tiny Americans out of a vending machine. What students wouldn’t dig that? Immediately, I was sucked back into the collection and ended up spending the rest of the weekend rereading the whole book. There are ghosts and demons, artists and lovers as Lima weaves magical, sometimes surreal, but always poetic stories that go deep about intimacy, the creative process, and what it means to be alive.
Anamely Salgado Reyes, author of My Mother Cursed My Name
“This book will make you want to call your mom” is one of the highest praises I, a lover of family-centered stories, can give to a novel. This book will make you want to call your mom immediately. Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours is a beautiful, tender debut about the evolving but everloving relationship between a mother living in Brazil and a daughter studying in the United States. Through Skype calls, the mother and daughter attempt to remain as close as possible, sharing personal life updates and learning about new cultures and cultural shifts. They worry about each other and the evident loneliness they feel, but there is only so much they can do for one another through a screen. Throughout the novel, we see the daughter deal with feelings of hope, excitement, doubt, guilt and concern as she settles into a new country and stage of life without being able to hold her mother’s hand. The story captures both the universal complexities of entering adulthood and the nuances of being a foreigner in the United States. As someone who has far too often heard the phrase “Stop worrying about your mom so much. She’s an adult,” I identified with the protagonist from the very first Skype call.
Jared Lemus, author of Guatemalan Rhapsody
In 2024, I managed to read 52 books. I’m a weirdo who would read nothing but short stories all year every year, if I could; so, in order to expand my horizons and reach some of my literary blindspots, I give myself a new reading challenge each year, in accordance with Stravinsky’s claim that “The more constraints are imposed, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit…and the arbitrariness serves only to obtain precision of execution.” This year, for instance, I’m hoping to read 52 books again, two for each letter of the alphabet by author’s last names, and last year I read nothing but non fiction books ranging from 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design to Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond. But my recommendation would have to be Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer. This book is so well-researched (years and years of research) but it reads like a novel. It painstakingly captures the devastating impact the US has had on Central American countries and focuses on people who survived some of the most violent periods in history: from La Matnza to US-backed coup d’etats to the founding of ICE concentration camps and the first Trump presidency. This book couldn’t be any more timely. Let’s teach real American history and keep the US from attempting to white-wash and repeat it.