Tag: debut

Interviews

How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

by AdamLeave a Comment on How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging
How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

The lives of two families collide in a most intriguing and shocking way in Andrea Uptmor’s darkly delightful debut novel, The New People. Faced with foreclosure and falling victim to the ruse of a real estate scammer, Charlotte and Dirk Deniison lose the place they called home faster than they can gather their belongings. The new owners, Emma and Rachel, settle into the house and what should’ve been a new start to an easy new life, only to discover that things aren’t always what they seem. The New People is a deeply moving novel that explores themes of love, loss, and community, and what it really means to feel at home.

Andrea Uptmor is a writer, editor, and a producer on the Taking Charge website at the University of Minnesota. As a content developer at the Center for Spirituality & Healing at the university, Andrea has been a part of a team that launched many online learning modules for healthcare professionals, students, and the general public on the topics of integrative nursing, wellbeing, resilience, and integrative therapies. She received her MFA in fiction at the University of Minnesota. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Master’s Review, among others. She lives in Chicago with her family. The New People is her debut novel.

Continue reading “How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging” →
Interviews

The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

by AdamLeave a Comment on The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed
The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

There’s a distinct thrill in reading a novel that makes you feel seen, mocked, and entirely transfixed. Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed does exactly that, delivering a sharp-witted and offbeat tale of obsession that I devoured in less than twenty-four hours. Adam of Debutiful calls the novel “sad, weird, and horny,” and I imagine most readers will relate to Astrid, the novel’s endearingly neurotic heroine, as she projects her literary and romantic obsessions onto real people.

I had a blast chatting with Buehler about the glorious voyeurism of autofiction, giving yourself permission to drop out of a PhD program, navigating the relentless pressure to produce, and the refreshing collaborative spirit of the international translation community.

Continue reading “The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed” →
Interviews, News

Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life

by AdamLeave a Comment on Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life
Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life

Hallie Elizabeth Newton‘s Agnes Lives! is as stylish as it is unsettling, following a young woman over the course of a single day as she searches for someone willing to kill her. Set in a vividly rendered 2014 New York City, the novel blends biting humor with profound despair, using Agnes’s wandering consciousness to examine privilege, performance, mental illness, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. It’s a formally daring debut that refuses easy answers while remaining compulsively readable.

I caught up with Newton to discuss writing a novel from the inside out, how screenwriting shaped her approach to fiction, capturing a specific moment in New York’s cultural history, and why embracing life’s messiness became the book’s guiding principle.

Continue reading “Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life” →
Interviews, my reading life

Amy Chozick on With Friends Like You, Cormac McCarthy, and Great Writing

by AdamLeave a Comment on Amy Chozick on With Friends Like You, Cormac McCarthy, and Great Writing
Amy Chozick on With Friends Like You, Cormac McCarthy, and Great Writing

Amy Chozick is a bestselling author, screenwriter, and award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Her debut novel, With Friends Like You, follows a struggling new mother whose obsessive search for her long-lost college roommate draws her into a hidden world of sex work, billionaire escorts, and long-buried secrets. Darkly funny and psychologically sharp, the novel explores friendship, motherhood, identity, and the dangerous line between devotion and obsession.

We asked Chozick to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

Continue reading “Amy Chozick on With Friends Like You, Cormac McCarthy, and Great Writing” →
Interviews

Roshan Sethi wrote The Simp almost as if he were rewriting Vanity Fair

by AdamLeave a Comment on Roshan Sethi wrote The Simp almost as if he were rewriting Vanity Fair
Roshan Sethi wrote The Simp almost as if he were rewriting Vanity Fair

Roshan Sethi’s debut, The Simp: A Novel Without a Hero, is a Hollywood satire written in conversation with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. It follows an aspiring actor into an assistant job from hell with a biting sense of humor, a keen point of view on identity politics, and a bit of hope for any artist creating into the void. If anyone could combine such seemingly disparate elements with confidence and control, it’s Sethi. He’s not just a novelist, he’s a director, screenwriter, and practicing oncologist.

The very busy Sethi made time after working on call at his hospital to speak over the phone about the perils of undergrad creative writing workshops, the trouble with The White Lotus season one, and why he almost exclusively reads the classics.

Continue reading “Roshan Sethi wrote The Simp almost as if he were rewriting Vanity Fair” →
Interviews

Arielle Hebert and Chelsea Krieg on Poetry, Place, Water, and Friendship

by AdamLeave a Comment on Arielle Hebert and Chelsea Krieg on Poetry, Place, Water, and Friendship
Arielle Hebert and Chelsea Krieg on Poetry, Place, Water, and Friendship

Few people understand a poetry collection better than another poet. We asked Arielle Hebert, author of Bottom Feeders, and Chelsea Krieg, author of Everything Is Water, to chat about their collections and how poetry informs their life.

The two discuss the landscapes that shaped them, the role of water and the natural world in their work, caregiving, motherhood, friendship, and the complicated process of writing toward forgiveness. Their exchange is both an exploration of craft and a testament to the writing communities that sustain poets through every stage of the journey, from first drafts to first books.

Continue reading “Arielle Hebert and Chelsea Krieg on Poetry, Place, Water, and Friendship” →
Interviews, my reading life

Jayson Greene wishes he had gotten into literary sci-fi and speculative fiction earlier in life

by AdamLeave a Comment on Jayson Greene wishes he had gotten into literary sci-fi and speculative fiction earlier in life
Jayson Greene wishes he had gotten into literary sci-fi and speculative fiction earlier in life

When Jayson Greene‘s debut novel, UnWorld, came out last year, he appeared on our First Taste Reading Series podcast, where he read an excerpt from the novel.

The book, out now in paperback, follows four interconnected lives after the mysterious death of a young man in a near-future where human consciousness can be digitally replicated, and AI has begun to reshape what it means to be alive.

We asked Greene to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers can get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.

Continue reading “Jayson Greene wishes he had gotten into literary sci-fi and speculative fiction earlier in life” →
Interviews

Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us

by AdamLeave a Comment on Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us
Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us

There is a specific feel to the way time moves during a childhood and adolescent summer. It’s both sludgy and warp-speed, too slow when you need it to end, too dreadfully quick just when you need it to last. These summers are foundational in how a person learns to be: how you are when you’re bored is as important as how you are when you’re in the middle of the starburst of feeling. 

Sofia Montrone, in her outstanding debut Nymph, displays a mastery of the effects of time, how the days themselves characterize us. The novel, set in rural Italy over two very distinct summers, is an elegy for the way time leaves us. It is a love story as much as it is a loss story as much as it is a celebration of the brutal, giddy risk of feeling. It has a wicked sense of humor. There are retellings of The Odyssey, deeply-felt family pains, a formative romance and a consistent sense of becoming. 

But above all, it achieves what all great art aspires to: it makes the reader feel less alone. I came upon this novel in the noblest way, I think. A friend recommended it. He said, “This one’s something special.” He was right. 

Continue reading “Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us” →
inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts

by AdamLeave a Comment on Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts
Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts

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 Perverts, writer Mac Crane explores the messy intersections of desire, shame, intimacy, and identity through seventeen audacious stories that push queer life to its exhilarating and unsettling extremes. Set in worlds where people pay to reenact hate crimes, ogle mythical performers, or blur the lines between fantasy and exploitation, Crane’s characters search for connection in places most people would rather ignore. Equal parts provocative, darkly funny, and unexpectedly tender, Perverts argues that those living on society’s margins often see its contradictions most clearly. Crane is also the author of the novel I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, and Lambda Literary Awards winner, as well as A Sharp Endless Need. Their fiction has appeared in Literary Hub, The Sun, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Joyland, and elsewhere, and they have received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, American Short Fiction, and the Vermont Studio Center.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Crane takes readers inside their debut short story collection, Perverts.

Continue reading “Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts” →