Category: Interviews

Interviews, my reading life

Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

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Sarah Wang, author of New Skin, wants you to read Carceral Capitalism

Sarah Wang’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Now, her debut novel, New Skin, has hit the shelves at bookstores.

Following a mother and daughter trapped in a toxic cycle of love, resentment, and reinvention, New Skin is a scalding, darkly humorous debut novel about plastic surgery addiction and the false promises of the American Dream. When Linli Feng returns home to care for her estranged mother after another botched procedure, she is pulled into the dangerous world of black-market beauty treatments and exploitative reality television, forcing both women to confront the damage that obsession and survival have inflicted on their lives.

We asked Wang to answer 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

Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

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Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging

What does it cost a family to cross an ocean — and who pays the price for generations to come? That is the quietly devastating question at the heart of Davin Malasarn’s debut novel The Outer Country.

The story begins in Thailand, where two sisters have their lives irrevocably split when their parents make the agonizing decision to send only one daughter to America — the foreign land the family calls “the outer country.” When the choice defies expectation, a wound opens between the sisters that time and distance only deepens.

Years later, one sister’s young son, Ben, becomes the center of the family’s unspoken tensions. When signs of gender nonconformity surface in him, a fateful decision is made that will cast a long shadow over his childhood — and set in motion a story about inheritance, silence, and the slow, difficult work of self-becoming. As Ben grows, he must navigate his queer identity, fractured family relationships, and the weight of a past that no one wants to name, moving between Thailand and Los Angeles and eventually to Stanford.

The Outer Country is a book about what we inherit, what we survive, and what it takes to finally tell the truth.

Continue reading “Inside The Outer Country: Davin Malasarn on Immigration, Queerness, Family, and the Limits of Belonging” →
Interviews, my reading life

Mercy Hill author Hannah Thurman wants to read all the Pulitzer fiction winners

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Mercy Hill author Hannah Thurman wants to read all the Pulitzer fiction winners

Set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hannah Thurman‘s debut novel, Mercy Hill, follows four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. Richard Russo says it “will stay with you long after you put the book down.”

Thurman, who is based in Brooklyn, was the winner of the Florida Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize for Fiction, and her stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She has been chosen for residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

We asked her to answer 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

Hasan Dudar on the Complexities of the Family-Owned Corner Store in Carryout

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Hasan Dudar on the Complexities of the Family-Owned Corner Store in Carryout

Hasan Dudar’s Carryout is a marrow-deep collection of linked stories rooted in the Arab diaspora, with themes of displacement and identity, as well as threads of melancholy and humor. Out now from the University of Iowa Press, the book follows Ziad Idilbi, a Palestinian refugee from Lebanon, and his wife Salma, a Lebanese refugee who escaped the war in Beirut, as they set roots in Toledo, Ohio. The displaced couple open a carryout, a corner store, from which they carve out a living. They have three children: eldest son Mustafa, only daughter Nawal, and youngest son, Walid — an aspiring poet.

With great lucidity and wit, Dudar brings readers a vivid portrait of immigrants and refugees who have no other choice but to create a new community for themselves in the United States. Carryout is poignant and tender — a mosaic of life experiences and the complex inner monologues of characters who are grappling with the complicated legacy that is displacement. 

I spoke with Dudar about the inspiration behind Carryout, the complexities of the corner store, and major themes embedded in his debut.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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Interviews

Imani Thompson on Writing Honey, Misogyny, and the Lovable Psychopath

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Imani Thompson on Writing Honey, Misogyny, and the Lovable Psychopath

Imani Thompson’s debut novel, Honey, explores the sticky side of what it means to be a woman in a world full of men that functionally disregards women. Yrsa is fed up and bored with her school life, so she kills. At first, because she can, but essentially, because she feels that ridding the earth of the kind of man that makes it hard for women to live here is important work. Men who hurt her, her friends, and women in general. Thompson’s novel is witty, electric, thrilling, and thought-provoking. She blends themes of misogyny, narcissism, race, and class with ease, while assuring that the reader can still see the softness and humanness of the story’s protagonist, Yrsa.

I spoke with Thompson about writing the terrible thing, what community looks like in the literary world, and the rhythm of language and words.

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Interviews, my reading life

Vincent Yu, author of Seek Immediate Shelter, says literary influence has always been inextricably tied to anxiety

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Vincent Yu, author of Seek Immediate Shelter, says literary influence has always been inextricably tied to anxiety

Set in a small Massachusetts town, Vincent Yu‘s debut novel, Seek Immediate Shelter, follows a group of residents whose lives fracture in the moments after a false ballistic missile alert forces them to act on their most instinctive impulses. In the aftermath, each must confront the consequences of what they revealed about themselves, as the ripple effects of those choices unfold over years.

We asked Yu to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Good News author Alexa Yasemin Brahme wishes she had read Melissa Broder as a teen

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Good News author Alexa Yasemin Brahme wishes she had read Melissa Broder as a teen

Alexa Yasemin Brahme‘s writing has earned her nominations for is a Pushcart Prize, the Robert J. Dau PEN Award, and Best of the Net. Originally from Southern California, she received her MFA from the New School and currently lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a bookseller at Books Are Magic (aka Debutiful’s favorite bookstore in America).

Now, her novel Good News has arrived. Set in New York City, Good News follows a young artist whose creative ambitions and personal life begin to unravel as her thesis falters, her relationships strain, and a magnetic ex reenters her orbit. As pressures mount from family, love, and the art world, she is forced to question not just her work but the life she’s been building.

We asked her to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

Continue reading “Good News author Alexa Yasemin Brahme wishes she had read Melissa Broder as a teen” →
Interviews

Guided by Voices: Grace Spulak on Violence, Justice, and Seizing the Right to Speak

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Guided by Voices: Grace Spulak on Violence, Justice, and Seizing the Right to Speak

Grace Spulak’s debut collection, Magdalena Is Brighter Than You Think, winner of Autumn House Press’ 2025 Rising Writer Prize, gathers eleven stories set mostly in rural New Mexico among people pushed to the margins. The lives here belong to queer women, non-binary folks, and kids who’ve slipped or been shoved past the edge of any safety net: the poor, the dispossessed, those for whom institutional neglect and violence are not interruptions but the terms of daily life. Darkness is the backdrop – yet the stories are less interested in tallying damage than in tracking the ways these characters angle toward a scrap of light and try to improvise an exit where none really exists.

With a JD from Harvard Law School and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers—where she and I first met—Grace brings a double education in law and literature to Magdalena’s formal decisions. Nearly a decade representing children and young people in New Mexico’s courts has made her attuned to the small, skewed survival narratives people build when no one believes them, and the collection moves through those registers: the borrowed textures of trial transcripts and corporate jargon, the slippages in point of view, the sentence that can withhold and indict in the same breath. 

She and I spoke via email about these formal gambits and about why fiction, precisely because it fractures, distorts, and rearranges, sometimes get closer to what’s happened than any official record. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Continue reading “Guided by Voices: Grace Spulak on Violence, Justice, and Seizing the Right to Speak” →