Tag: author

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 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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Interviews

Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

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Nadia Bowers on Bringing Her Sister Back to Life in Dear Dealer

Dear Dealer by Nadia Bowers is an unflinchingly honest, wholly unique portrait of a sister left behind, charting the messy unraveling of a loved one’s addiction and the complicated search for acceptance in the aftermath. In the summer of 2015, Bowers’s beloved older sister, Sasha—an Ivy League-educated social worker—was found dead in her car from a fentanyl overdose. Stricken with grief and just weeks from giving birth to her first child, Bowers armed herself with Sasha’s cell phone and began to investigate her sister’s secret life to answer the nagging questions she couldn’t shake: Who sold Sasha the drugs that killed her? How did they know each other? Did the dealer really know Sasha in the way she deserved to be known?

Part epistolary, part mystery, part family history, part love letter, part diary, and part personal reinvention, Dear Dealer is an unputdownable homage to her sister and a reckoning with the steep cost of addiction and the way tremendous loss remodels one’s sense of self. 

I spoke with Bowers about her evolution from private writer to published author, avenging her sister’s death the best way she knew how, and what she’s learned from the processes of writing, publishing, and living the ending in real-time. 

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

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See the cover for The Ninth Island by Andrew Chi Keong Yim

Andrew Chi Keong Yim’s The Ninth Island is a poetry collection about displacement, inheritance, and the search for home, following his family from Hawaiʻi to Las Vegas while reaching across generations to his Chinese American great-grandmother.

Yim is a poet and teacher whose work explores family, place, and the forces that shape Hawaiʻi and its diaspora. The Ninth Island will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on February 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Ninth Island, designed by Alex Wolfe with photography by Patrick Nevada. Below, Yim discusses images of Hawaiʻi, Las Vegas’s culture of facsimile, and how an empty pair of car seats came to capture the book’s themes of absence, longing, and displacement.

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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

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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Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

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See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

In her debut novel, The Light in Other Houses, Anna Marschalk-Burns explores motherhood, infertility, desire, and found family. The novel follows Zoe, who returns to her hometown of Minneapolis after years of failed fertility treatments and finds herself drawn into the lives of her new neighbor Danni and her five-year-old daughter.

Marschalk-Burns is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship and the Himan Brown Award. Her short fiction has appeared in SLICE, Joyland, and Literary Hub. Her debut novel is set to be published by Zando on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal The Light in Other Houses’s cover, designed by Lucy Kim and featuring a painting by Jeremy Miranda, along with a Q&A with Marschalk-Burns about its creation.

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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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