Tag: novel

Book Covers, News

See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

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See the cover for Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring by Jared Lemus

Jared Lemus’s debut novel, Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring, is a suspenseful, mythic story about survival, devotion, greed, and the inescapable pull of the past. In the remote Guatemalan town of Huecotenango, outcasts and wanderers have built lives alongside residents with extraordinary abilities, including a woman who can shapeshift into a jaguar, a healer who absorbs the ailments of others, and a young woman indebted to the god of the underworld. When two brothers arrive after a crash on the outskirts of town, their illicit work threatens to disrupt the community and sets its residents on a dangerous collision course.

Lemus is the author of Guatemalan Rhapsody, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Story, and elsewhere. Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring will be published by Ecco on April 20, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal Magic in the Land of Eternal Spring’s cover, designed by Vivian Rowe, along with a Q&A with Lemus about its creation.

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book list

Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

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Five Novels Written by Women Featuring Feminine Rage, recommended by Isabelle Spotts

Feminine rage is a hot term as of late. While it may seem like a timely publishing trend, there’s nothing new or trendy about the concept—except perhaps the prevalence of novels continuing to explore the topic, for which I am very grateful. The brutality of the female experience—the undoing and eventual reclamation of women who have been figuratively crushed under societal pressures, or who face literal harm simply for existing and then respond in kind—is as evergreen as the struggles themselves. My debut novel, Saint Delilah, has a strong dose of female rage. It’s a good for her revenge story that follows a young woman who was tragically murdered by a man who believed a girl like her would never be missed. Delilah returns as a ghost to reclaim what is rightfully hers—an afterlife—and the story does not shy away from the very real danger of being a woman subject to the male gaze. Here are five novels that tell the stories of women who refuse to back down, who go a little rightfully crazy, and who find themselves enraged.

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Interviews

When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project

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When Harry Met Sally Met Marguerite Duras: Inside the Mind of Annie Lord, Author of The Project

Annie Lord has served as British Vogue’s dating columnist and previously wrote a darkly comic memoir about the demise of her five-year relationship. So it’s no surprise that she knows all the romcom tropes and subverts them with aplomb in her fiction debut The Project. The novel reads as a modern Pygmalion in reverse, with best friends Daisy and Maya pledging to emotionally, culturally, and stylistically make-over their laddy friend James. It’s all too easy to connect with these funny, flawed characters—likewise with Lord, even over email and across six time zones. Her responses to my questions—covering everything from her favorite Marguerite Duras quote to how to write a good bad sex scene—were candid and charming. No doubt she’d make a great romcom heroine.

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Interviews

Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times

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Devyn Defoe on Burnside, Lemony Snicket, and Writing the End Times

In Burnside, Devyn Defoe paints an end-of-days portrait of two young women in California that manages to make you laugh, break your heart, and double-check that you’re actually awake and not in some absurdist hallucination. Referred to as a “signature chronicle of our American endtimes” by author Chang-rae Lee, Defoe’s unforgettable characters navigate patriarchy, climate crises, and a whole host of issues for which we can thank late-stage capitalism. 

I sat down with Devyn Defoe to discuss how Burnside came to be, the enduring influence of Lemony Snicket, and the endless rewards of bookselling. 

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Interviews

Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City

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Stacey Yu on Love, Magic, and Coming of Age in New York City

Kitten by Stacey Yu, one of Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books, follows protagonist Katie, who is fresh out of university and desperate not to enter the adult world quite yet. When she goes to the Hamptons with her boyfriend James, she becomes instantly enamored with his cat Silver. 

Across Katie’s dynamics with James and Silver, we understand the wound of her upbringing: her enmeshment with her mother, her anxious attachment, and her tendency to seek what is familiar over what is healthy or good. In Silver, she sees the potential for the eternal and pure childhood that she so craves, but she also knows that this desire is impossible.

Katie wants to be both left alone and folded into the world. She wants to be free of responsibility but she also wants to have purpose and grounding. Ultimately, she has to set herself (and Silver) free from these impossible oppositions, and choose a path forward. 

Stacey and I spoke about how this tender coming-of-age novel came to be, and the redemptive quality of small, simple choices. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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inside the collection, Interviews

Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

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Inside the Collection: Emily Doyle dissects Please Don’t Touch the Body

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 Please Don’t Touch the Body, Emily Doyle delivers eleven inventive, genre-bending stories that explore the vulnerabilities, contradictions, and strange absurdities of modern life. Moving effortlessly between the surreal and the deeply human, the collection follows characters searching for agency, intimacy, and belonging—from a woman reclaiming herself through an anonymous advice column to Ronald Reagan reincarnated as a puppy and a young woman untangling the expectations of her religious upbringing from her own desires. By turns funny, unsettling, and emotionally resonant, Please Don’t Touch the Body announces Doyle as a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction. Doyle is also the author of the forthcoming novel Encounter. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, and she has received numerous honors, including the Abraham Lincoln Polonsky Endowed Award and the Bread Loaf–Rona Jaffe Foundation Participant Scholarship. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Riverside.

In our latest Inside the Collection Q&A, Doyle takes readers inside her debut short story collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Untranslatable by Lara Vergnaud

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See the cover for Untranslatable by Lara Vergnaud

Untranslatable, the debut memoir by Lara Vergnaud, traces the intersections of language, identity, and everyday life through the eyes of a literary translator. As Vergnaud brings novels across linguistic and cultural borders, she navigates her own experiences with illness, infertility, marriage, and the lingering sense of unbelonging shaped by a life between countries and languages. Weaving together personal reflection with the art of translation, the memoir explores what it means to remain invisible while giving voice to others, and how language can both reveal and obscure the self.

Untranslatable will be published on February 16, 2027, by Catapult and is available for preorder now.

Lara Vergnaud is a writer and literary translator specializing in North African literature. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and Words Without Borders, and she has translated more than a dozen novels, including The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, which was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Born in Tunisia, raised in the United States, she now lives in southern France.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Untranslatable, designed by Victoria Maxfield with art direction from Nicole Caputo, along with a Q&A with Vergnaud about its creation.

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Interviews

Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name

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Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name

All That’s Unseen by Emilee Hackney is a powerful coming-of-age memoir, detailing the author’s upbringing in the Appalachian mountains: her radical church background, her family’s struggles with poverty, and the soaring mountains that inspire awe yet seem to keep people from ever leaving the region. As a teenager, Emilee is ensnared in the Pentecostal church (later called a “cult” by her friend) and almost marries a predatory older man, Sam, who uses their shared religion to control her. When she finally breaks away from the church—and from Sam—and attends Harvard, what could be a victorious escape becomes, instead, a new series of trials. Feeling like an outsider in Cambridge, she grows depressed, then turns to sex work and a series of relationships to ease her loneliness. It is only when—bristling at the negative stereotypes she encounters at Harvard about Appalachia—Emilee begins writing that she is able to find her own voice and to reconcile her ambiguous feelings about where she comes from.

Told in elegant prose, All That’s Unseen is a fascinating, thought-provoking memoir that interrogates questions of faith, family, agency, and belonging.

I spoke with Hackney over Zoom. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

Continue reading “Emilee Hackney on Speaking in Tongues, Trad Wife Culture, and the Other Appalachian Memoir We Won’t Name” →