Lauren Friedlander’s debut novel, Sensual World, is a surreal Midwestern campus gothic about ambition, obsession, and the terrifying lengths we’ll go in the name of art. Seventeen-year-old Bet Cowl escapes her remote Kansas hometown after discovering the manuscript of a supposedly cursed play and earning admission to the infamous acting conservatory founded by its playwright, Una Flood. There, Bet falls into an intense friendship with former child star Helen as the two endure increasingly extreme demands on their bodies, minds, and relationship. Queer, strange, and darkly funny, Sensual World asks what happens when artistic devotion begins to look a lot like self-destruction.
Friedlander is a writer and graphic designer from Kansas who now lives in New York. She is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sensual World will be published by Catapult on March 23, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Sensual World, designed by Victoria Maxfield and art-directed by Nicole Caputo. Below, Friedlander discusses the visual moodboard that accompanied her through eight years of writing, the artistic references that shaped the novel’s strange world, and the uncanny experience of finally seeing her book with a face of its own.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I weirdly kind of didn’t. Weird because I’m a graphic designer (though definitively not a book cover designer), and weird because I consistently worked with a visual moodboard open on a second monitor throughout the eightish years I worked on the book.
So I had a lot of visual inspiration I was drawing from—Andrew Wyeth paintings for Junction X, the fictional Kansas town from which the protagonist hails; ’60s Beckett productions, Francis Bacons, Louise Bourgeoises, and Butoh dancers to inform the extreme performances; Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning as a model for the Conservatory tower—but no concrete ideas for a cover, necessarily. I was really looking forward to conspiring with my editor and Victoria Maxfield to see what they thought this weird little world might look like.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your
publishing team?
I filled out an extremely fun and lengthy author questionnaire a couple of months after I signed with Catapult, which allowed me lots of room to wax dreamsical about said moodboard, and other visual references. I am so tickled that the Cathedral of Learning itself wound up as the tower on the cover. My editor, Elizabeth Pankova, also had a lot of great instincts about tone and color palette that felt very much aligned with my vision (blurry as it was), pulling comp covers like Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, M.L. Rio’s Hot Wax, Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Uncanny and surreal. The baby goes a long, long time without a face; it is just a mess of Scrivener folders you are sick of looking at, then: a face! It feels a part of and apart from you at the same time. In many ways it is no longer yours by now, and must step out into the sensual world on its own.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
I feel like there is something new to appreciate every time I look at it. I love how Victoria (who is also a wonderful illustrator) designed the handwritten text, both the oozy title treatment that is just Goosebumps-adjacent enough for this aging millennial, and the almost girlish cursive of “a novel” underneath. I love the stark sans serif of my name beneath the hole—as beneath the hole just so happens to be the locale from which our narrator (no spoilers!) speaks.
Of course for a book called Sensual World, the coital wink of the massive tower in flagrante with the gaping, red, and glowing hole is the perfect signal to the reader, I think, that there may be spooky things afoot within these pages, but hey, we’re gonna have some good old college fun along the way.