Tag: writer

Book Covers, News

See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

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See the cover for The Light in Other Houses by Anna Marschalk-Burns

In her debut novel, The Light in Other Houses, Anna Marschalk-Burns explores motherhood, infertility, desire, and found family. The novel follows Zoe, who returns to her hometown of Minneapolis after years of failed fertility treatments and finds herself drawn into the lives of her new neighbor Danni and her five-year-old daughter.

Marschalk-Burns is a graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, where she received a Truman Capote fellowship and the Himan Brown Award. Her short fiction has appeared in SLICE, Joyland, and Literary Hub. Her debut novel is set to be published by Zando on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal The Light in Other Houses’s cover, designed by Lucy Kim and featuring a painting by Jeremy Miranda, along with a Q&A with Marschalk-Burns about its creation.

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Interviews, my reading life

Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often

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Luke Larkin’s The Unheld is a horror Western set in the haunted Montana Territory, where twelve-year-old Charlie sets out to rescue her father after a nightmarish creature drags him into the wilderness. Joined by an Englishman connected to a mysterious occult society and a Northern Cheyenne policeman living in exile, Charlie ventures into a landscape populated by strange creatures and supernatural threats. Blending Western grit with horror, The Unheld explores loneliness, alienation, and the complicated bonds that hold people together.

Larkin is a queer writer living in Big Sky Country, where he received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. The Unheld is his debut novel.

Larkin answered our My Reading Life Q&A about the books and writers that have shaped him as a reader and writer.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover and read an exclusive excerpt of The Joplin Horror by Jason Kaleko

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Debutiful is excited to reveal the cover of The Joplin Horror, the debut novel from award-winning screenwriter Jason Kaleko. This cinematic psychological horror follows a crew of graverobbers who descend into an ancient mausoleum expecting an easy score, only to find an impossible labyrinth, disappearing memories, and something hunting them from just beyond the light.

Perfect for readers of Mark Z. Danielewski, Chuck Wendig, and Paul Tremblay, The Joplin Horror is a claustrophobic descent into buried trauma, fractured reality, and a place that seems determined to keep its visitors forever. It will be published by DAW on May 25, 2027. It is available for preorder now.

Debutiful is honored to reveal The Joplin Horror‘s cover, designed by Adam Auerbach, along with an exclusive excerpt from the novel.

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for All of Us Wildflowers by Tria Wen

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See the cover for All of Us Wildflowers by Tria Wen

Tria Wen’s All of Us Wildflowers is an intergenerational memoir about grief, inheritance, and breaking the cycle of women living for others before themselves. Following her mother’s death, Wen begins dismantling the careful life she has built, including her seemingly perfect marriage. Searching for guidance in her mother’s journals and letters, she discovers versions of the woman she never knew: an immigrant who left part of herself behind, an artist constrained by the role of housewife, and a woman whose unrealized dreams continue to echo through her daughter’s life. Moving between generations and across time, All of Us Wildflowers asks where a mother’s story ends and a daughter’s begins.

Wen is a California-based writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, and Narratively, among others. She is a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and Chautauqua Janus Prize and a recipient of the California Arts Council Emerging Artist Fellowship. All of Us Wildflowers will be published by Counterpoint Press on March 9, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of All of Us Wildflowers, designed and art directed by Nicole Caputo. Below, Wen discusses the wildflowers and other visual motifs that inspired her, how her mother’s journals helped give the memoir its title, and how the final design captures a life that can be fragmented and messy while still remaining whole.

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News

See the cover for Overwintered by Elina Katrin

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See the cover for Overwintered by Elina Katrin

Overwintered, Elina Katrin‘s debut poetry collection, explores the body as a site of memory, displacement, illness, and renewal. Moving between Syria, Russia, and the United States, Katrin traces the complicated experience of inhabiting the immigrant body, the female body, and the ailing body while searching for connection and belonging. Through recurring images of flowers, dreams, and changing seasons, the collection considers what we inherit, what we carry alone, and what it means to emerge from winter transformed.

Overwintered will be published on February 1, 2027, by Trio House Press and is available for preorder now.

Elina Katrin is a poet and writer whose work explores migration, memory, womanhood, and the body. Her debut poetry collection, Overwintered, is forthcoming from Trio House Press.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Overwintered, designed by Coral Sue and featuring Lovis Corinth’s Women with Lilies in a Green House, along with a Q&A with Katrin about its creation.

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Interviews

Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

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Murder, Bougie Dogs, and Reality TV Collide in Mimi Montgomery’s Murder Bites

Murder Bites, Mimi Montgomery’s debut novel, is a satire of reality TV, millennial dog culture, and 2020s politics, yet what is surprising is its earnestness. Underneath the surface is a novel about people’s capacity to change and a story relatable to anyone who ever felt like they didn’t belong. In this conversation, Mimi and I talked about character arcs, Carl Hiaasen, and, of course, DMX. 

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Book Covers, News

See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

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See the cover for Sensual World by Lauren Friedlander

Lauren Friedlander’s debut novel, Sensual World, is a surreal Midwestern campus gothic about ambition, obsession, and the terrifying lengths we’ll go in the name of art. Seventeen-year-old Bet Cowl escapes her remote Kansas hometown after discovering the manuscript of a supposedly cursed play and earning admission to the infamous acting conservatory founded by its playwright, Una Flood. There, Bet falls into an intense friendship with former child star Helen as the two endure increasingly extreme demands on their bodies, minds, and relationship. Queer, strange, and darkly funny, Sensual World asks what happens when artistic devotion begins to look a lot like self-destruction.

Friedlander is a writer and graphic designer from Kansas who now lives in New York. She is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Sensual World will be published by Catapult on March 23, 2027.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of Sensual World, designed by Victoria Maxfield and art-directed by Nicole Caputo. Below, Friedlander discusses the visual moodboard that accompanied her through eight years of writing, the artistic references that shaped the novel’s strange world, and the uncanny experience of finally seeing her book with a face of its own.

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Interviews

Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

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Something Is Stirring in the Welsh Mountains in Liam Higgingon’s The Hill in the Dark Grove

Liam Higginson’s The Hill in the Dark Grove is a gorgeously written folk horror with a compelling atmosphere of mounting dread. At sixty-five years old, Carwyn is facing the knowledge that the farm his family has owned in the mountains of northern Wales will likely end with him. Rhian, his wife and partner since they were teenagers, had the brilliance to go anywhere and do anything with her life, if only she hadn’t fallen in love with Carwyn, his family, and with working the farm. Mountain life is hard but not harsh – at least not harsh in a way anyone with a rural upbringing wouldn’t recognize – but forest figures some might call myths are never far from the dark crags of this landscape. The perils of sheep farming all seem to come to a head at once, making Carwyn and Rhian fear they might be living under a curse.

For as long as Carwyn can remember, his family’s land has coughed up trinkets from eras past, including a figurine with odd energy which makes him not want to keep it in the house. Then the overgrown lower pasture reveals itself, and Carwyn believes he’s found the secret to saving his farm. Rhian wants to support her husband’s new interest in the field he’s avoided his whole life, but when curiosity descends into obsession, she has to decide whether she can trust this new version of the man she loves.

I’ve rarely felt so engulfed by a reading experience. Even as my fear built over what was to follow, I could not stop turning pages to find out what would become of this couple. Liam and I spoke via email about the parallels between Welsh and Native storytelling, the importance of Welsh voices telling Welsh stories, and what it’s like to be an outsider artist. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Interviews

In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

by AdamLeave a Comment on In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?
In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?

Téa Mutonji‘s My Person opens on an ordinary evening that will not stay ordinary: Tania and Margot, best friends of over twenty years, are getting ready to host their monthly dinner party when Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore. It is a small sentence that detonates a life. What follows is not a plot in the traditional sense but a slow unraveling — a “rigorous revision of history,” as the novel puts it — in which two women, one lack and the other white, who have loved each other since girlhood are forced to ask what, exactly, they have been to one another all this time.

Set against the frame of a tense, cross-race and class, will-they-won’t-they breakup power dynamics, My Person follows Tania’s meditative, often wry narration as she tries to live loudly on the outskirts of Margot’s world, even as Margot’s old betrayals come into sharper focus. But Mutonji refuses to let anyone play villain or victim. Margot means well — doesn’t she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania simply been blind to the patterns all along? The book keeps that ambiguity alive until its final pages, less interested in assigning blame than in understanding how two people build a shared history — and how brutal it is to dismantle one.

Threaded through the friendship story is an unflinching look at race, class, and privilege, and the quiet, corrosive weight of what is owed between people who love each other unevenly. In the interview that follows, Mutonji speaks about naming the book, writing without villains, and why a friendship breakup felt like the truest container for everything she wanted to explore.

Continue reading “In My Person, Téa Mutonji Asks: Is It Codependency, or Is It Just History?” →