Tag: writer

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” →
Interviews

How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

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How Andrea Uptmor’s The New People Reimagines Home, Loss, and Belonging

The lives of two families collide in a most intriguing and shocking way in Andrea Uptmor’s darkly delightful debut novel, The New People. Faced with foreclosure and falling victim to the ruse of a real estate scammer, Charlotte and Dirk Deniison lose the place they called home faster than they can gather their belongings. The new owners, Emma and Rachel, settle into the house and what should’ve been a new start to an easy new life, only to discover that things aren’t always what they seem. The New People is a deeply moving novel that explores themes of love, loss, and community, and what it really means to feel at home.

Andrea Uptmor is a writer and editor who received her MFA in Fiction at the University of Minnesota. Her short fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, PANK, and The Masters Review, among others.

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Interviews

The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

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The Many Lives of Lizzie Buehler: Translation, Medicine, and The Obsessed

There’s a distinct thrill in reading a novel that makes you feel seen, mocked, and entirely transfixed. Lizzie Buehler’s The Obsessed does exactly that, delivering a sharp-witted and offbeat tale of obsession that I devoured in less than twenty-four hours. Adam of Debutiful calls the novel “sad, weird, and horny,” and I imagine most readers will relate to Astrid, the novel’s endearingly neurotic heroine, as she projects her literary and romantic obsessions onto real people.

I had a blast chatting with Buehler about the glorious voyeurism of autofiction, giving yourself permission to drop out of a PhD program, navigating the relentless pressure to produce, and the refreshing collaborative spirit of the international translation community.

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Interviews, News

Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life

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Hallie Elizabeth Newton on Agnes Lives!, Millennial Despair, and Writing the Messiness of Real Life

Hallie Elizabeth Newton‘s Agnes Lives! is as stylish as it is unsettling, following a young woman over the course of a single day as she searches for someone willing to kill her. Set in a vividly rendered 2014 New York City, the novel blends biting humor with profound despair, using Agnes’s wandering consciousness to examine privilege, performance, mental illness, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. It’s a formally daring debut that refuses easy answers while remaining compulsively readable.

I caught up with Newton to discuss writing a novel from the inside out, how screenwriting shaped her approach to fiction, capturing a specific moment in New York’s cultural history, and why embracing life’s messiness became the book’s guiding principle.

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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, my reading life

The Flayed Man Author Chloe Lauter Reveals the Weird Stories That Made Her a Writer

by AdamLeave a Comment on The Flayed Man Author Chloe Lauter Reveals the Weird Stories That Made Her a Writer
The Flayed Man Author Chloe Lauter Reveals the Weird Stories That Made Her a Writer

Set against the Mojave Desert and Las Vegas, Chloe Lauter‘s debut novel, The Flayed Man, blends horror, dark fantasy, and family drama into a gripping story of survival and sacrifice. Ellis Karsten spends her days caring for patients in the emergency room and her nights searching for blood to keep her family’s monstrous curse at bay. But when her uncle disappears and her mother’s worsening dementia becomes entangled with terrifying warnings about an ancient creature known as the Flayed Man, Ellis must confront the possibility that the greatest threat to her family is no myth at all.

We asked Lauter 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.

Continue reading “The Flayed Man Author Chloe Lauter Reveals the Weird Stories That Made Her a Writer” →