Category: Interviews

Interviews

Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett

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Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett

A debut novel that’s shortlisted for the Booker Prize is a rare coup: with May We Feed the King, Rebecca Perry finds herself in the company of Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Avni Doshi (Burnt Sugar), and Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain). But it’s a well-established nominee who she credits with inspiring her novel. Reading Percival Everett’s The Trees, which she describes as “batshit” in the best of ways, showed her it was possible to write the kind of genre-bending book she aspired to. 

With May We Feed the King, Perry works in historical fiction but questions memory, research, and truth. A curator is commissioned to arrange rooms for the 750th anniversary of a palace. She avoids looking at her own past by becoming lost in the mysterious legacy of a medieval king. When the anniversary celebration begins, she implores visitors to consider history elastic and make their own meaning from the artifacts in the rooms.

Genre isn’t the only literary norm Perry played with. We connected via email about her choices with plot, white space, and writing in the bath.

Continue reading “Rebecca Perry might not have written her Booker-shortlisted novel if it weren’t for Percival Everett” →
Interviews, my reading life

How Little Women and Contemporary Poetry Shaped Poet K.T. Landon

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How Little Women and Contemporary Poetry Shaped Poet K.T. Landon

K.T. Landon’s Abide is a poetry collection about mortality, grief, and the unexpected joy that can emerge from moving through loss. Written over the course of a decade, the poems reckon with the death of Landon’s sister, her own cancer diagnosis, marriage, faith, and memory while finding humor and moments of transcendence in everyday life.

Landon’s poems have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, North American Review, and Best New Poets, among others. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a reader for Lily Poetry Review.

The poet answered our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Interviews

Carrie Lee South on writing terror for her novel In the Woods They Wait

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Carrie Lee South on writing terror for her novel In the Woods They Wait

Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is a suspenseful novel with horror elements, astute prose, and emotional heft. The book opens in 2004 when Audrey Figg is a teenager tasked with watching her younger brother. He disappears into the woods of Devil’s Den State Park within the Ozark Mountains. Fifteen years later, Audrey is a park ranger in the same woods, and a little girl goes missing, echoing her brother’s disappearance. 

The author drew on her own sibling loss to imbue the book with the complexity of grief and the terror of loss. It is a suspenseful novel with line-level precision. South’s description of setting is also forceful, and the natural world is a presence throughout her debut novel. 

I spoke via email with South about writing suspense and twists, her own connection to the Ozarks, and the influences that informed her horror novel In the Woods They Wait.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews, my reading life

Ankur Thakkar Reads for Voice, Structure, and Reinvention

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Ankur Thakkar’s Blow Yourself Up follows Arjun and Payal, two high school sweethearts whose lives diverge as the internet transforms around them. While Payal rises through New York’s influencer economy, Arjun finds himself moderating the darkest corners of the same social media platform. Spanning eight years, the novel explores creative ambition, identity, love, and what we sacrifice in the endless pursuit of being seen.

Thakkar is a writer and multimedia artist whose stories have appeared in Guernica, PANK, and TriQuarterly. A 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar, he has also exhibited artwork at the Palais de Tokyo and La Friche la Belle de Mai.

For My Reading Life, Thakkar spoke with Debutiful about discovering The Mahabharata as a child, the novel that inspired him to begin writing Blow Yourself Up, and the diasporic writers who helped shape his work.

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing

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Inside the Collection: Karishma Jobanputra dissects The Body of the Thing

What makes a great short story collection? In Debutiful’s latest Q&A series, Inside the Collection, short story writers will take readers through their writing, editing, and sequencing of their debut short story collection.

In The Body of the Thing, Karishma Jobanputra delivers a lyrical and visceral collection exploring the hierarchies that shape women’s relationships with their bodies and with one another. Moving from first loves and sexual awakenings to motherhood, miscarriage, illness, caregiving, and death, the stories examine what happens when women’s bodies are desired for their beauty and youth, dismissed when they become ill, or valued for what they can provide to others. Set across Manhattan, Italy, coastal Maine, and London, The Body of the Thing is a fluid, sensual, and fearless examination of what it means to look at and live in the female body, in all its complicated realities and wonders. Jobanputra is a British-Indian writer based in London and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Fiction program. Her work has been listed for the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize for Fiction. The Body of the Thing is her first book.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Jobanputra takes readers inside her debut short story collection, The Body of the Thing.

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Interviews

Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

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Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers is an unflinchingly honest, wholly unique portrait of a sister left behind, charting the messy unraveling of a loved one’s addiction and the complicated search for acceptance in the aftermath. In the summer of 2015, Bowers’s beloved older sister, Sasha—an Ivy League-educated social worker—was found dead in her car from a fentanyl overdose. Stricken with grief and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Bowers armed herself with Sasha’s cell phone and began to investigate her sister’s secret life to answer the nagging questions she couldn’t shake: Who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? How did they know each other? Did the dealer really know Sasha in the way she deserved to be known?

Part epistolary, part mystery, part family history, part love letter, part diary, and part personal reinvention, Dear Dealer is an unputdownable homage to her sister and a reckoning with the steep cost of addiction and the way tremendous loss remodels one’s sense of self. 

I spoke with Bowers about her evolution from private writer to published author, avenging her sister’s death the best way she knew how, and what she’s learned from the processes of writing, publishing, and living the ending in real-time. 

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Interviews

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

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If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different. 

Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow. 

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catching up with, Interviews

Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

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Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

What happens after your debut book is published? Would you do anything different for your second novel?

These are the questions I so often want to ask debut authors but never get the chance to unless I bump into them at an event or we cross paths in DMs on social media.

So, Debutiful’s launching a new Q&A to catch up with some of our favorite debuts as they launch and promote their next books.

First up is Ariel Delgado Dixon, whose first book, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was a Debut Debut Book of 2022. Her sophomore book, Sourland, came out in June 2026, and I caught up with her via email for this new series.

Sourland is about two women battling for control of a Northern California farm after its enigmatic owner suddenly disappears, forcing them to confront old rivalries, buried secrets, and the lingering influence of the woman who brought them together.

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Interviews, my reading life

Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

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Anna Heyward Still Re-Reads Sherlock Holmes Every Ten Years

Anna Heyward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vogue, and more, and studied animal behavior and welfare science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

In Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, Heyward writes about adopting Freddie, an Italian greyhound with severe separation anxiety, and how trying to understand his mind transformed the way she saw her own. It’s a moving meditation on the relationship between humans and animals, what we can truly know about another being, and how much we should try to change those we love.

Heyward answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her book.

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Interviews, my reading life

Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

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Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.

In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.

ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.

Continue reading “Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse” →