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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: M Lin discusses The Memory Museum”Debutiful Podcast: M Lin discusses The Memory Museum
Category: Interviews
Debutiful Podcast: Monika Ostrowska discusses Squirming
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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: Monika Ostrowska discusses Squirming”Writer/Translator: Agnieszka Szpila and Scotia Gilroy discuss Hexes of the Deadwood Forest
Hexes of the Deadwood Forest, the debut novel from Polish writer Agnieszka Szpila, was translated into English from Polish by Scotia Gilroy. The novel has been called “a torpedo of a book” by Olga Tokarczuk and follows a disgraced oil executive whose public scandal fractures her identity, sending her spiraling across time and consciousness until she is absorbed into a radical, centuries-old sisterhood of women whose ecstatic rebellion against patriarchy builds toward a violent and transformative reckoning.
In our latest interview series, “Writer/Translator,” we ask a writer and their translator to interview each other about their work. Below, Szpila and Gilroy discuss the origins and inspirations behind the novel, the role of sexuality and political/ecological themes, and the process of translation as a creative, transformative act.
Continue reading “Writer/Translator: Agnieszka Szpila and Scotia Gilroy discuss Hexes of the Deadwood Forest”A History of Heartache author Patrick Strickland was inspired by his former teacher, Patricia Lear
Patrick Strickland is the author of Alerta! Alerta! Snapshots of Europe’s Anti-Fascist Struggle, The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, and You Can Kill Each Other After I Leave: Refugees, Fascism, and Bloodshed in Greece.
His debut short story collection, A History of Heartache, is filled with fourteen stories that chart the small mercies and big mistakes that make a life.
We asked him 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.
Continue reading “A History of Heartache author Patrick Strickland was inspired by his former teacher, Patricia Lear”Erin Van Der Meer on The Scoop, Tabloid Journalism, and the Ethics of Media
Erin Van Der Meer’s The Scoop is a piercing look at the horrors of celebrity tabloids, turned on its head: the call is coming from inside the proverbial house, here, as we follow the downward spiral of laid-off journalist Frankie. A once-praised New York journalist, Frankie finds herself washed up in a sea of rejections as she looks for work – any work – after being let go from her glossy magazine job.
When her desperation becomes dire, Frankie is offered a position at The Scoop, a clickbait-fueled tabloid. As she joins the ranks as a night editor, Frankie finds the night desk is a constant churn of distasteful fodder, yet her unquenchable thirst for achievement pulls her deeper into her quest for the kind of career she watches her old friends and colleagues achieve. The Scoop asks just how far Frankie must be willing to go to rise up the journalism ranks – and at what cost?
I spoke with Erin about her writing life, her transition from journalism to fiction, and how The Scoop came to be.
Continue reading “Erin Van Der Meer on The Scoop, Tabloid Journalism, and the Ethics of Media”Gabrielle Sher, author of Odessa, is always inspired by Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson
In Odessa, Gabrielle Sher introduces Yetta, a restless teenage girl coming of age in a shtetl shadowed by fear, where disappearances and whispered violence press in on daily life. After a brutal attack leaves her dead, her father turns to forbidden texts and uncertain magic to bring her back, but what returns is not entirely the daughter he lost. As Yetta begins to sense the truth of what she has become, the novel unfolds into a haunting story of grief, identity, and the consequences of trying to reverse the irreversible.
We asked Sher 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.
Continue reading “Gabrielle Sher, author of Odessa, is always inspired by Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson”Tom Junod on Writing About His Father, Masculinity, and the Secrets That Shape a Life
In his new memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom Junod reckons with the myth and reality of his father, a man whose presence shaped everything, even in what went unsaid. In this conversation, he discusses masculinity, memory, and the challenge of telling the truth without losing the complexity of love.
I caught up with Junod via email to discuss fatherhood, performance, and the tension between who we remember and who we understand.
Continue reading “Tom Junod on Writing About His Father, Masculinity, and the Secrets That Shape a Life”Asa Drake on Maybe the Body, Poetry, and the Search for Home
For National Poetry Month, we asked Tsahai Makeda to sit down with Asa Drake, whose debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, was released on February 24, 2026, from Tin House.
This is their conversation.
Continue reading “Asa Drake on Maybe the Body, Poetry, and the Search for Home”Seven Elegiac Books Recommended by Leigh Lucas
As I set out to write my own, I read many elegies of classic and contemporary poetry, memoir, and hybrid texts with visual art. The elegy is as old as literature itself, but the form has been reinvented again and again in our attempt to make meaning of loss, honor the deceased, and to get as close as we can to conveying the experience of grief—something that thousands of years later remains out of our grasp, just beyond the reaches of language. Here are seven of my favorites.
Continue reading “Seven Elegiac Books Recommended by Leigh Lucas”Question & Agent: Julie Gourinchas of Bell Lomax Moreton
Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Julie Gourinchas is a literary agent at Bell Lomax Moreton in the UK. Writers she works with have won or been nominated for the British Book Awards, the Hugo Awards, the Stoker Awards, the BSFA Awards, the Betty Trask Award, and the Saltire National Book Awards, among others.
We dug into why she loves “weird girl lit,” the differences between agent work in the US and the UK, and why she’s an atmospher-first reader.
Continue reading “Question & Agent: Julie Gourinchas of Bell Lomax Moreton”