Tag: author interview

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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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Bodies of Water by Rebecca Winterich-Knox

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See the cover for Bodies of Water by Rebecca Winterich-Knox

Rebecca Winterich-Knox’s debut novel, Bodies of Water, is a gothic domestic drama about grief, betrayal, and the secrets that surface when two families reunite at an ancestral seaside estate. Set over one week on the Massachusetts coast, the novel follows seven characters reckoning with loss, shifting relationships, and the histories that bind them together.

Winterich-Knox holds an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. Bodies of Water will be released by Zando on June 15, 2027. It is available for preorder now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Bodies of Water, designed by Ash Tsai. Below, Winterich-Knox discusses drawing inspiration from the New England coastline, creating a sense of suspense through landscape, and how two nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings were transformed into the novel’s stormy seaside cover.

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book list

Five Novels that Use Time Jumps to Advance the Plot, Recommended by Madeleine Moss

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Five Novels that Use Time Jumps to Advance the Plot, Recommended by Madeleine Moss

How can you make ordinary life feel resonant enough to function as literature? One of the ways is to structure it well. Time jumps—whether they be quick sneak-peeks into the future, as Muriel Spark does, or dramatic jumps of several years, as in Henry James’ work—can give resonance to a work of seemingly straightforward literary fiction. For this list, I’m not talking about books that include time travel, but rather novels that are interested in using “sleights of time” to make ordinary stories feel both dramatic and satisfying.

In my debut novel, Mistranslation, I employ several large time jumps in the narrative. By including a childhood section, a teenage section, and an adult section, I hope to infuse energy into the narrative at each jump and also to place certain moments in the lives of my characters in closer proximity to each other. In childhood, my main character Sabina meets Khalil—the boy who’s moved in across the street—and notices that he has popsicle juice staining his mouth. Their meeting is confrontational. In adolescence, during another pivotal moment, a drink has stained his mouth and it reminds her of something, although she can’t say what. By placing these two ordinary moments close together, I hope to create something that feels meaningful—in other words, that feels like plot.

Below, I’ll recommend five character-driven novels that use time jumps in innovative ways.

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book list

Seven Writers to Read After Helen Garner, recommended by Leah De Forest

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Seven Writers to Read After Helen Garner, recommended by Leah De Forest

It’s a funny thing, teaching writing in a country I didn’t grow up in: I’ve shucked off some identity markers (few in Boston can place the mid-sized-town-outside-of-Melbourne in my accent, for example), and I’m keenly aware of the culture that raised me. Much of what I read as a child was British: The Magic Faraway Tree and The Tale of Peter Rabbit (the foliage in those illustrations was so green). At university I read some Australian classics and many more British and American books. I still own a cinder-brick sized copy of The American Tradition in Literature, though until relatively recently I’d managed to avoid Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby. Don’t judge.

You all missed out on some gems, though. In high school, I loved Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow, about a Sydney teen who travels back in time; and at university and through adulthood, I read the work of writers like Elizabeth Jolley, Hazel Rowley, Christina Stead, and Helen Garner (now well known outside of Australia). 

These voices helped me develop my own. Now, to mark the publication of my debut novel, Any Kind of Known Tomorrow, I have the great good fortune to be telling you about seven contemporary Australian writers, women whose work is part of the tradition that raised me. Each in their way—in the language, the attitude of the characters, the shape of the landscape—these books feel like home.

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book list

Five Very Different Stephen King Novels That Prove He Can Do Anything, Recommended by Ryan Lowell

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Five Very Different Stephen King Novels That Prove He Can Do Anything, Recommended by Ryan Lowell

I first read Stephen King when I was fourteen. The book was Pet Sematary, and I found it disturbing and terrifying and, maybe more than anything else, realistic. Not that I expected to see our deceased pets crawling back into the dooryard, but the characters and their language were genuine and authentic and made me empathize with them in a way I did not expect. From then on, I was hooked, to the point that my parents bought me “The Stephen King Companion” for my next birthday. 

I already knew a fair amount about Mr. King. I grew up in Bucksport, Maine, a half hour outside of Bangor where King has lived much of his life. He was a staple at the old Bangor Auditorium during the annual high school basketball tournaments. My father’s roofing company had done extensive work at his residence, and it was not uncommon to see him bopping around town or stopping by the deli at the Fairmount Market like a regular dude – not one of the most famous writers in the world. 

Most people immediately think horror when they think of Stephen King. I do not. I think of fascinating characters and great dialogue and rich storytelling that has always made me want to come back for more. I have much admiration for many other writers – Graham Greene and William Faulkner first come to mind – but Stephen King has been the single biggest influence on my reading and writing life.

Here are five of my favorite Stephen King books. 

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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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book list

Five Books That Center Bodegas, Recommended by Amaris Castillo

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When I’m not in the comfort of my own home, the bodega feels like the next best thing. All my life, I’ve recognized bodegas – these small owner-operated convenience stores – as community anchors. They always provide the essentials, and something more. In here, stories are abundant, its customers a carousel of characters. 

My debut book, Bodega Stories, follows the people who orbit my parents’ bodega in St. Petersburg, Florida, with interwoven stories from my parents’ beginning as bodega workers in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of a year, I made countless visits to the store to see what I could gather about this place, what I could observe. And what I found was a portrait of seeking home.

Whether you call them something different where you live, bodegas have long proven to be integral parts of the communities they serve. And they’ve been the source of inspiration behind many books and other works of art. Here are five books that I have enjoyed that are related to the bodega.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander

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See the cover for The House in Talbiya by Omer Friedlander

Omer Friedlander’s The House in Talbiya is a multigenerational novel following two families, one Israeli and one Palestinian, connected by a house in Jerusalem. Spanning a century, the novel moves from Prague and Jerusalem to Ramallah, Berlin, and New York, exploring diaspora, exile, loss, and the longing for home.

Friedlander is the author of The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. He was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Tel Aviv, and now lives in New York City. The House in Talbiya will be published by Random House on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The House in Talbiya, designed by Rachel Ake. Below, Friedlander discusses the paintings that inspired the cover, the significance of its house and bird imagery, and how the final design captures the novel’s fragmented layers of memory, displacement, and home.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Gold in the Furnace

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See the cover for Gold in the Furnace

Kathleen McNamara’s Gold in the Furnace is a debut story collection exploring life at the edges of reality in the modern American West. Across landscapes shaped by fire, flood, and snow, McNamara’s characters confront addiction, paranoia, grief, climate disaster, and the strange places where the natural and supernatural collide.

McNamara’s fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Witness, and elsewhere. Gold in the Furnace, winner of the EastOver Press Prize for Debut Story Collection, will be published February 23, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Gold in the Furnace, designed by Beste M. Doğan. Below, McNamara discusses her desire for a dreamlike cover, the influence of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Four Seasons in One Head, and how classic art came to capture the collection’s dark, surreal, and occasionally playful vision of the American West.

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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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