Tag: debut

Interviews, my reading life

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

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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.

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Interviews

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

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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.

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Interviews

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

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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.

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Interviews, my reading life

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

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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.

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Interviews

Sofia Montrone on Nymph and the Strange Way Time Shapes Us

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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. 

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Mac Crane Dissects Perverts

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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.

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Interviews, my reading life

Ben Reeves, author of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, reveals the books that shaped his life

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Ben Reeves, author of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, reveals the books that shaped his life

Ben Reeves’s debut novel has already earned significant recognition before publication, with an early draft of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt winning the 2024 Bath Novel Award. Now, the UK author makes his debut with a novel that asks one of literature’s oldest questions through an unexpected narrator.

In Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, Death isn’t a terrifying force but a quiet, compassionate presence named Travis, who spends his days comforting people in their final moments. But when he befriends a midwife and her young daughter across the hall, he begins to discover what it truly means to live. Tender, philosophical, and quietly hopeful, Reeves’ novel is a moving meditation on grief, love, and the fleeting beauty of being alive.

Reeves answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his debut novel.

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Interviews

Chiara Bullen on D&D, Fantasy Taverns, and Writing Like You Rolled a Nat 20

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Chiara Bullen on D&D, Fantasy Taverns, and Writing Like You Rolled a Nat 20

The Inn at the Foot of Mount Vengeance captures everything that makes a great TTRPG campaign memorable: the camaraderie, improvisation, and delight of telling a story with friends. In her debut novel, Chiara Bullen follows an ambitious historian investigating a legendary mountain where adventurers arrive eager for glory, yet somehow never make the climb. We spoke with Bullen about D&D’s influence on her writing, creating unforgettable fantasy taverns, and why food scenes are always a critical success.

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: T Clark dissects All This Want (And I Can’t Get None)

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Inside the Collection: T Clark dissects All This Want (And I Can’t Get None)

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 All This Want (And I Can’t Get None), writer T Clark captures the feverish hunger and dizzying pleasures of Black girlhood and queer coming-of-age. Set largely in and around a working-class neighborhood just outside New York City, the stories follow young Black girls, women, and nonbinary characters as they navigate the uneasy space between adolescence and adulthood, desire and restraint, and the people they are and the people they might become. Prior to publishing their debut collection, Clark’s fiction appeared in Joyland, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Offing, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. They also received fellowships and support from the Omi International Arts Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Vermont Studio Center.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Clark takes readers inside their debut short story collection, All This Want (And I Can’t Get None).

Continue reading “Inside the Collection: T Clark dissects All This Want (And I Can’t Get None)” →