Debutiful’s Adam Vitcavage recommends noteworthy debut books for readers to discover each month.
Continue reading “14 noteworthy debut books you should read this April”14 noteworthy debut books you should read this April
Tag: interview
First Taste: Lena Moses-Schmitt Reads From True Mistakes
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Continue reading “First Taste: Lena Moses-Schmitt Reads From True Mistakes”My Reading Life: Just Want You Here author Meredith Turits likes to deal with the quiet discomfort
Meredith Turits was a founding editor of Bustle and has written for Vanity Fair, ELLE, BBC.com, Electric Literature, and the Paris Review Daily. She’s turned her attention to fiction with her debut novel Just Want You Here, which follows Ari after the sudden ending of a decade-long relationship. What follows is a romp of a coming-of-age novel filled with mess, stress, and lust.
We asked the author to answer our recurring My Reading Life questionnaire so readers could get to know the books that shaped her throughout her life.
Continue reading “My Reading Life: Just Want You Here author Meredith Turits likes to deal with the quiet discomfort”Plagues, Power, and Public Health: Uncovering the History of Disease and Its Lasting Impact with Edna Bonhomme
In A History of the World in Six Plagues, historian Edna Bonhomme delivers a searing examination of how disease outbreaks—far from being equalizers—have long been shaped by systems of power and inequality. From cholera to COVID-19, Bonhomme traces the global legacy of six major plagues, revealing how public health crises are entangled with race, class, and political policy. Spanning continents and centuries, this urgent and beautifully crafted work is both a meticulous history and a call to rethink how we respond to future pandemics.
We emailed with Bonhomme about the hidden stories behind the world’s deadliest diseases, the intersection of science and social justice, and why history’s greatest epidemics are never just about medicine.
Continue reading “Plagues, Power, and Public Health: Uncovering the History of Disease and Its Lasting Impact with Edna Bonhomme”What You Make of Me author Sophie Madeline Dess always had a compulsion to create art
Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer and critic based in New York whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Drift, and more. She teaches at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. What You Make of Me, her debut novel, is a haunting exploration of sibling devotion, artistic ambition, and the cost of success. As painter Ava prepares for her first solo show, she reflects on her tangled relationship with her brother, Demetri—a bond forged in loss but frayed by betrayal and regret as his life nears its end.
Sophie and I talked on the phone about the ways we treat books as personal artifacts, the difficulty of summarizing one’s own work, and how art, history, and beauty shape her creative vision.
Continue reading “What You Make of Me author Sophie Madeline Dess always had a compulsion to create art”Debutiful Podcast: How Doncaster and Disability Shaped and Re-Shaped Colwill Brown’s writing
Writing Towards Discomfort: Michael Amherst on The Boyhood of Cain
Michael Amherst is a writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, and other publications. He is the author of Go the Way Your Blood Beats: On Truth, Bisexuality & Desire, which won the 2019 Stonewall Book Award for nonfiction, and his debut novel, The Boyhood of Cain, is out now. The novel is a coming-of-age novel about a boy named Daniel, whose intense longing for love and recognition leads him into a complex web of desire, power, and betrayal. Set in the English countryside, the story follows his deep attachment to a new classmate and their shared fascination with a charismatic teacher, forcing Daniel to navigate the painful contradictions of devotion and self-discovery.
Amherst and I chatted via email about the intuitive nature of writing, the tension between knowing and uncovering a story, and how setting shapes the characters who inhabit it.
Continue reading “Writing Towards Discomfort: Michael Amherst on The Boyhood of Cain”Nicole Graev Lipson on Motherhood, Literature, and the Power of Complexity
Nicole Graev Lipson is an essayist whose work has appeared in The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Millions, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, among other publications. Her debut book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, is a braided memoir that weaves personal experience with literary reflections to explore motherhood, womanhood, and the transformative power of reading.
Lipson and I chatted via email about the complexities of female friendship, the fictions that shape women’s lives, and the freedom that comes with aging.
Continue reading “Nicole Graev Lipson on Motherhood, Literature, and the Power of Complexity”Why Mazeltov writer Eli Zuzovsky needs to create art
Eli Zuzovsky is a writer/director who has been awarded the Israeli Academy Award and has been selected for the Israeli Forbes list of “30 Under 30,” the Séries Mania Writers Campus, and the London Library Emerging Writers Programme. His debut novel Maveltov, which was a Debutiful Most Anticipated Debut Book of 2025, is a polyphonic story about a young boy’s bar mitzvah and the swirling expectations of what it means to become a man at the young age of thirteen.
Zuzkovsky and I chatted via Zoom about art and what drives him. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of that conversation.
Continue reading “Why Mazeltov writer Eli Zuzovsky needs to create art”First Taste: Sarah Lyn Rogers reads from Cosmic Tantrum
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Continue reading “First Taste: Sarah Lyn Rogers reads from Cosmic Tantrum”