Kathleen McNamara’s Gold in the Furnace is a debut story collection exploring life at the edges of reality in the modern American West. Across landscapes shaped by fire, flood, and snow, McNamara’s characters confront addiction, paranoia, grief, climate disaster, and the strange places where the natural and supernatural collide.
McNamara’s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Gold in the Furnace, winner of the EastOver Press Prize for Debut Story Collection, will be published February 23, 2027.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Gold in the Furnace, designed by Beste M. Doğan. Below, McNamara discusses her desire for a dreamlike cover, the influence of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons in One Head, and how classic art came to capture the collection’s dark, surreal, and occasionally playful vision of the American West.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I knew I wanted a dreamlike cover for the collection. These are twenty-first century characters who grapple with a sense of surrealist dissociation in their lives, as they confront addiction, paranoia, grief, and climate disaster in the modern American West. Choosing an Italian Renaissance-era painting, then, might seem incongruous. But when it came time to actually design a cover, a memory of this work, “Four Seasons in One Head” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, asserted itself in my mind. I’ve always loved covers that repurpose classic art for contemporary stories. I find the disjunction of that intertextuality intriguing. I’m thinking of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh and Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham. I wanted the cover to channel that sense of anachronistic disquiet at first glance.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
Everyone at EastOver Press has been so supportive. They asked me if I had ideas or wishes for the cover, and we brainstormed together on possibilities. The last story in the collection, “Aquarius,” appeared in 2022 in the North American Review alongside surrealist art by Deedee Cheriel, which featured animal/human hybrid figures. That was the first time I saw how an accompanying visual could deepen a reader’s response to one of my stories. When the first story in the collection, “Cryptozoology,” won the 2024 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction Prize at Winning Writers, the editors there commissioned an artist to illustrate the story for their website. So I got a sense over the years of how editors and other artists were visualizing these stories. Ultimately, Beste M. Doğan did a beautiful job interpreting what I was hoping to convey.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
Thrilling! As though I had somehow tricked reality into conforming to a dream I’d had. And it was even more exciting when I had the physical ARC in my hand. When we unboxed it, my husband Chad Fore, who is also a writer, said he got a little choked up. I did too.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
Like the cover image, the stories in Gold in the Furnace are dark, but they are also populated with whimsy and levity and humor. Many of these characters live in direct contact with wilderness spaces, both literal and psychological, and grapple with what it means to inhabit their bodies and a changing planet. “Four Seasons in One Head” encapsulates that sense of being both part of the earth and distinct from it. This book has fires, floods, flowers, and an avalanche. Sometimes trees take on human form.