Tag: debut

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

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. 

Continue reading “Five Very Different Stephen King Novels That Prove He Can Do Anything, Recommended by Ryan Lowell” →
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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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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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed

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See the cover for Side Streams by Yasmin Adele Majeed

Yasmin Adele Majeed’s debut novel, Side Streams, is a polyphonic story about family secrets, queer identity, art, and the silences passed between generations. Growing up between her mother’s Filipino American roots and her father’s tight-knit Pakistani American community in the Bay Area, Aliya Amjad becomes fascinated by the mysteries her mother refuses to explain, including an art installation dedicated to an unknown woman. Decades later, Aliya reconnects with her childhood friend Samir, and together they begin untangling the secrets their parents kept and questioning whether silence protected their families or simply kept them apart.

Majeed is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and American Short(er) Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2025, Narrative, Guernica, and Joyland, among others.

Side Streams will be published by Little, Brown on March 30, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Side Streams, designed by Grace Han with art direction by Keith Hayes. Below, Majeed discusses wanting a cover grounded in the California Bay Area, the Diego Rivera mural that helped inspire the novel, and how the final design captures the beauty, friction, and wonder of trying to turn an artistic vision into something tangible.

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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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Interviews

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

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If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different. 

Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow. 

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News

Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

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Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2026 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers the chance to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity of their first or second major book publication.

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catching up with, Interviews

Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

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Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

What happens after your debut book is published? Would you do anything different for your second novel?

These are the questions I so often want to ask debut authors but never get the chance to unless I bump into them at an event or we cross paths in DMs on social media.

So, Debutiful’s launching a new Q&A to catch up with some of our favorite debuts as they launch and promote their next books.

First up is Ariel Delgado Dixon, whose first book, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was a Debut Debut Book of 2022. Her sophomore book, Sourland, came out in June 2026, and I caught up with her via email for this new series.

Sourland is about two women battling for control of a Northern California farm after its enigmatic owner suddenly disappears, forcing them to confront old rivalries, buried secrets, and the lingering influence of the woman who brought them together.

Continue reading “Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland” →