The Younger and Other Stories, the debut short story collection by Daniel J. O’Malley, gathers haunting stories that trace the moments when ordinary life begins to drift into the uncanny, when circumstances shift, reality dissolves, and the familiar world reveals itself to be far stranger than it first appeared. By turns tender and unsettling, the collection explores the unstable spaces between connection, consequence, and uncertainty in prose that is elemental, precise, and quietly unnerving.
The Younger and Other Stories will be published on April 13, 2027, by Hub City Press.
Daniel J. O’Malley’s fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Granta, Subtropics, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He grew up in Missouri and currently lives in West Virginia, where he teaches at Marshall University.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Younger and Other Stories, which features art by Nancy Friedland, along with a Q&A with O’Malley about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
For years my focus was only ever on this or that individual story, trying to find my way through each one, which sometimes was quite a process. On some level, I knew I was working toward a collection, but it wasn’t until the entire thing was written that I started to notice the connections, the way the stories spoke to each other – that’s how I knew it was finished, I think, this sudden seeing of what I’d been doing. Along the way, I never gave much thought to a cover. If I ever tried to conjure an image, it would’ve been hazy, possibly glowing, something vaguely book-shaped.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
The team at Hub City has been a dream to work with on the design. They asked me for examples of covers I liked and didn’t like, which felt daunting at first, and I’m sure I went overboard with the number of examples, but I hoped some kind of coherence would emerge. Then Meg mentioned that they could also reach out to artists, if I had anyone in mind, and immediately I thought of Nancy Friedland. She’s an incredible painter – I think I first saw her work in an issue of Harper’s a few years ago. So I sent over a few images of her paintings as possibilities, and fairly quickly we were set. It was just a matter of choosing which painting – not easy, as so many of her pieces could be stunning book covers – and then getting the font and placement dialed in. I’m wildly grateful, to the team for being open to suggestion and to the artist for her willingness to share her work.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Considering that I had seen the painting before, I honestly was surprised at what a powerful experience it was to see it all come together. It felt sort of like when you finish a story, when you get to this place that you didn’t see coming, didn’t know that’s where you were headed, not precisely, but somehow you have arrived – a wonderful feeling.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The painting conveys a kind of moody loneliness – that solitary car – with a sense of possibility – that expanse of wide sky – but also the chance of menace and mystery along the way. You see a car on the road and you might wonder who’s in there, who’s driving, where are they going, what have they left behind … or maybe you wonder who’s doing the watching, who’s at the roadside, crouching in a ditch, maybe, seeing this car pass by.
I love the visibility of the brushstrokes, the way the image approaches reality without mirroring it. I think the stories in the collection can work that way too, situating themselves somewhere along an edge, in terms of realism. A lot of the characters are searching for things, trying to figure out what they should do, where they should go, how to make their way through the world and not be alone. Often they’re surprised at what’s possible.