Category: my reading life

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, 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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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.

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Interviews, my reading life

Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

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Afsheen Farhadi on Mixed-Genre Novels That Inspire Him

In False Prophet, Afsheen Farhadi explores what happens when grief, ambition, and storytelling can’t be separated. The novel follows actor Jal Persad, who, after his mother’s death, begins writing a memoir that places her at the center of Jim Jones’s rise in Guyana. The problem: almost none of it is true. As Jal’s fabricated story gains attention, Farhadi examines the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, and what can be lost when those stories become more useful than the truth.

We asked Farhadi to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers could learn about the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

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Interviews, my reading life

Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

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Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

Kate Riley’s debut book, Ruth, is about Ruth.

Ruth grows up in an insular Christian communist community where private property is forbidden, daily routines are acts of prayer, and questioning the world around her is discouraged. Told in glimpses across her childhood, marriage, and motherhood, the novel follows Ruth as her persistent curiosity collides with a life built on faith, conformity, and holy mystery, asking what it truly means to be happy and to live a meaningful life.

It was one of the titles I wish I’d gotten around to reading last year, but missed. Now, her debut is out in paperback, so we caught up with Riley so she could answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A.

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Interviews, my reading life

Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often

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Luke Larkin’s The Unheld is a horror Western set in the haunted Montana Territory, where twelve-year-old Charlie sets out to rescue her father after a nightmarish creature drags him into the wilderness. Joined by an Englishman connected to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman living in exile, Charlie ventures into a landscape populated by strange creatures and supernatural threats. Blending Western grit with horror, The Unheld explores loneliness, alienation, and the complicated bonds that hold people together.

Larkin is a queer writer living in Big Sky Country, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. The Unheld is his debut novel.

Larkin answered our My Reading Life Q&A about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

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Interviews, my reading life

Nita Noveno Finds Freedom in Breaking Form

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Nita Noveno Finds Freedom in Breaking Form

Nita Noveno’s Mud on the Moon is a hybrid memoir that explores the obscured past of her Filipino immigrant father, who arrived in the United States in 1928. Alternating between Noveno’s own coming-of-age story and imagined chapters from her father’s life, the book fills the gaps between what was known, remembered and left unsaid. Blending personal and historical narratives, Mud on the Moon considers how family, memory and identity are shaped by the stories passed between generations.

Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and is the founder and host emeritus of the New York City reading series Sunday Salon. Her work has appeared in Mãnoa, Identity Theory, Brink, Hippocampus, The Hunger, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s Open City and The Margins, and elsewhere.

For My Reading Life, Noveno spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.

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Interviews, my reading life

Drew Buxton Reads for Voice, Craft and the Swerve

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Drew Buxton Reads for Voice, Craft and the Swerve

Drew Buxton’s Daytona Teddy Riggs follows Teddy “Daytona” Riggs, a former high school football star in 1996 Corpus Christi who is determined to win the World’s Strongest Man competition. Cast out from his oil-rich family and devoted to the teachings of a self-help guru, Teddy’s obsessive pursuit of strength begins to unravel when a relationship with a local bodybuilder forces him to confront the insecurities beneath the muscle. Buxton’s debut novel blends outrageous comedy and satire with an exploration of masculinity, privilege, mental illness and obsession.

Buxton is the author of the story collection So Much Heart, winner of the Texas Institute of Letters’ Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction. His work has appeared in Southwest Review, Joyland, Vice, and elsewhere.

For My Reading Life, Buxton spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

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Interviews, my reading life

The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

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The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange

K.W. Oxnard’s The Leg in Question is a collection of fifteen stories exploring the strange, unsettling, and often darkly funny ways our bodies can betray us. Moving from post-World War I New York to pandemic-era Savannah, from Maine to Malaysia, the collection brings doctors and patients together at the uneasy intersection of medicine, mortality, obsession and desire.

Oxnard’s fiction has appeared in Story, Columbia Journal Online, Tahoma Literary Review and elsewhere. Her story “Belle of the Ball” won the 2024 Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and her work has been recognized by the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest and other awards.

For My Reading Life, Oxnard spoke with Debutiful about the books and writers that have shaped her as a reader and writer.

Continue reading “The Books That Taught K.W. Oxnard to Embrace the Dark and Strange” →