Category: News

Jan Saenz is a Houston-based author, poet, and educator whose debut novel, 200 Monas, is a riotous adventure that oscillates between feeling like a panic attack and getting a stomach ache from laughing so much. Pitched as being for fans of Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Miranda, Saenz follows Arvy Keening, a college senior who discovers a stash of a powerful pleasure-inducing drug in her dead mother’s closet and is given 48 hours by two dealers to sell all 200 pills or die, sending her and the campus dealer Wolf on a frantic, chaotic race through their college town that forces Arvy to confront buried grief, risky desires, and the strange ways people cope with loss.

We asked Saenz 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.

Yesena Barragan is a historian of the nineteenth-century Americas and Atlantic and Pacific worlds, focusing on race, slavery, and emancipation. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin American History from Columbia University and is now an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

In her new book, In Latin America You Could Be Free: An African American History, she explores a forgotten nineteenth-century geography of Black freedom across the Americas. As countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Mexico abolished slavery decades before the United States, Latin America came to occupy a powerful place in abolitionist imagination and strategy.

It will be published by Basic Books on November 10, 2026.

Debuitul is honored to reveal the cover of the book, which was designed by Alex Camlin, along with a Q&A with Barragan about how it was created.

Istanbul Dreaming, the debut novel from Denise Derya Brandt, is a historical coming-of-age novel about a young Turkish woman who defies family, faith, and tradition to claim autonomy over her body and future in 1950s Istanbul, as the country strains between conservative values and emerging modernity. After fleeing an abusive arranged marriage, Ayten builds an independent life among working women in the city and begins a forbidden romance with an American airman, forcing her to choose between family loyalty and the freedom to define her own life.

Brandt worked in international development for more than twenty years and led women’s health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar before starting to write fiction.

Istanbul Dreaming is set to be released by She Writes Press on September 29, 2026. It is available for pre-order now.

Debutiful is excited to reveal the cover, which was designed by Kat Black, along with a Q&A with Brandt about its creation.