Hillary Behrman is an award-winning writer who has received support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, the Willa Cather Foundation, Vashon Artist Residency, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff to win the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. It features stories that are set across the globe and exist at the intersection of social isolation and fierce intimacies and call into question the limits of our well-intentioned efforts to care for each other. It is available for pre-order from Sarabande Books and will be published on May 12, 2026.
Debutiful is honored to reveal Lake Effect‘s cover, designed by Emily Mahon, along with a Q&A with Behrman about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
When I was writing most of the stories in Lake Effect, I usually had intense and vivid visual images running around in my head, particularly when it came to the geography and landscapes in the stories. As I worked, real and imagined photos, drawings, maps, charts of city streets, mountains, and bodies of water informed the narrative. I am very influenced by the specifics of a place and so are my characters. But it wasn’t until the book was chosen for publication at Sarabande Books that I began to let myself think about an actual cover. And it became hard for me to conceive of a cover design that would somehow encompass all of the stories. I knew I wanted the cover to be an invitation to the reader. I hoped it would serve as a portal to the places they would travel with my characters both geographically and emotionally.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Sarabande’s editorial and design team are great. They solicited my input early on in an author questionnaire and then again once the designer, Emily Mahon, began to work on the cover. I sent them examples of cover art that I loved from their catalogue and other covers of books that seemed to share something with Lake Effect. At a certain point the team shared three possible directions they were considering for the artwork and design. I liked all of them. My initial gut reaction leaned toward a darker, more urban wilderness vibe, but I was won over by the gorgeous layered colored hills and mountains of the final design. I love that the landscape on the cover might not actually be possible, as if the mountains themselves are formed from our imagination and not geologically realistic. I was excited by and loved the collaborative aspect of how the text and cover came together. Emily read the book and the cover design was a product of her imagination as influenced by my stories. Finally on a more practical level, the folks at Sarabande know what they are doing, and I am new to all of this. I trust their vision.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Seeing Lake Effect’s cover for the first time was a wakeup call, it felt like wow, this is for real. Lake Effect is going to be out in the world and read by actual people that I don’t know. The cover made everything about having my first book published more tangible, more immediate, and more thrilling.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The people in the stories in Lake Effect are a restless and wandering bunch of folks. Wild spaces and hidden urban places exert a gravitational pull on their lives and relationships. The landscape on the cover could be somewhere imagined by one of the characters in the book or a place they are seeking out but will never find. Those mountains, the lake might be a landscape of refuge or danger. The artwork makes a person feel small or in just the right proportion to everything else in the world, everything that isn’t human.