Villains, the debut short story collection by Samantha Neugebauer, follows characters searching for purpose, enchantment, and connection across the United States and around the world. Spanning thirteen stories, the collection explores the tensions of self-mythology, social hypocrisy, and shame—often through mother-daughter relationships—as its characters struggle to distinguish what is lasting from what is fleeting, and what is truly meaningful from what has simply become familiar.
Villains will be published on January 26, 2027, by Washington Writers’ Publishing House and is available for preorder now.
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU Washington, DC, and a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. She holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins, an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. from NYU. Originally from Philadelphia, she spent nearly a decade working abroad and now lives in Washington, DC.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Villains, designed by Dave Ring, along with a Q&A with Neugebauer about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I wanted to avoid figuration. Figuration, I think, often predetermines how a reader will visualize and acculturate themselves to the story or stories within. In fact, it’s a very quick way for someone to say, ‘Nope, this book isn’t for me,’ especially since, more often than not, those covers will feature conventionally attractive profiles or bodies. So many legs.
I am drawn to beauty and mystery, which is different. I wanted a cover that evoked wonder, curiosity, authority. Not excitement, exactly. That word is fetishized and overused. It’s become a nothing word, an “um.”
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
My publishing team has been so thoughtful and responsive. At the beginning, they asked me for my cover ideas. They asked me to tell them about the covers I liked. They asked me to describe my ideal reader. Then, they welcomed my idiosyncratic answers, like, my ideal readers “are romantic like Isabel Archer. Or were,” or they “lived abroad, or wanted to live abroad, but never had the chance,” or they are people who “consider themselves open-minded and maybe urban and yet, for one reason or another, feel pushed out from the cool, affected world of letters.”
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Relief, I suppose. And marvel, and gratitude, like Mary Lennox stepping into the secret garden for the first time, and thinking, wow, could this be mine? Am I allowed to have this? Here is a contained thing for me to look after. Will I get in trouble? In his notes, Dave Ring, the cover designer, mentioned how the color was inspired by the “murderous pink sky” mentioned in the final story, and I was so appreciative of his attention to small details like this. I see the sky in the cover, but also a milky, taro-pink potion, the dense kind you were spooned as a child. Do you like the taste or not? Maybe you’re unsure. Your eyes can feel its thickness. Or, it’s also, as my friend, the poet Nathan Blansett, “chic as hell.”
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Dave Ring also mentioned how the “ornate V” had a “slight uterus vibe,” which speaks directly to one theory of female life held by a character in the story “Where is Melvyn Bragg?” And of course, several of my protagonists are women and girls, and women and girls are often cast as villains—and indeed, can behave villainously. But really, I hope the cover conveys other intentions, like my wish to cede control to the reader. Here’s a box of dreams, I’m saying, take and do as you will.
What is something you hope readers take away, even if their interpretations differ?
An understanding of my sensibility, certainly. I read an interview with Hiliary Mantel where she said that while she reads contemporary fiction, however, she sees it as an extension of newspaper reading. And I do think I have that experience reading a lot of current, lauded fiction. But although most of these stories are set in the present-day, I think the characters’ motives and the prose’s syntax show, hopefully, a mind and taste that moves backwards and forwards in time, seeking and salvaging.
Thematically, I think readers might find that the characters’ preoccupations differ from those we often meet in corporate publishing. Or, if the preoccupations do touch the zeitgeist, their fears and understandings of the present are less familiar. I am from the working class and so are many of my characters. In various places, including Substack, there’s a great deal of righteous anger directed at MFA programs, for instance, and at so-called MFA writing, with its middle-class and upper-middle class sensibilities and associations. And yes, that’s true, but also: here I am. I sacrificed, left a good-paying job to attend a fully-funded program, confounded my oldest friends and family (“Another degree?”) and my voice and vim and vigor survived. But I can also see how instead of this giving hope, this might just be frustrating. Instead of seeing a comrade in me, I might just become another villain.
Still, I’m betting on there being some fifteen-year-old girl somewhere, and some sixty-year old man, not seeing it that way, who, with me, is willing to feel all the mistiness and death in life.
Do you have any other favorite book covers?
Sure. Anna Marie Hong’s H & G is a come-hither. I like original illustrations and symbolism. I’d wager The Great Gatsby is the best cover in American literature. I admire the W.G. Sebald covers from New Directions. I also recently purchased Jack Zipes’ Once Upon a Time There Was Truth: or, Why We Need Fairy Tales, which has these gorgeous storybook drop caps.