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.
Continue reading “See the cover for Gold in the Furnace”