If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

If We Don’t Laugh We Cry: Discussing Fallow with Sarah Anderson

When a toothache prompts Natalie to seek a job with dental insurance, she finds herself in a contract with the insidious Company, who hires her to work as a highly-paid, highly-surveilled surrogate for its top-level employees. As Natalie embarks on her pregnancies, she finds herself redefining what it means to work, to mother, and to create fulfilling relationships with others. Sarah Anderson’s Fallow is all at once a human story of a struggling, imperfect, funny protagonist just trying to navigate society, and a poignant reflection on what that society asks of us—and what control we have to offer it something different. 

Read on for an interview with Sarah Anderson about Fallow. 

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Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Fiction Cohort

Poets & Writers has announced the Fall 2026 fiction cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers the chance to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity of their first or second major book publication.

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Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

Catching Up With Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of Sourland

What happens after your debut book is published? Would you do anything different for your second novel?

These are the questions I so often want to ask debut authors but never get the chance to unless I bump into them at an event or we cross paths in DMs on social media.

So, Debutiful’s launching a new Q&A to catch up with some of our favorite debuts as they launch and promote their next books.

First up is Ariel Delgado Dixon, whose first book, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You, was a Debut Debut Book of 2022. Her sophomore book, Sourland, came out in June 2026, and I caught up with her via email for this new series.

Sourland is about two women battling for control of a Northern California farm after its enigmatic owner suddenly disappears, forcing them to confront old rivalries, buried secrets, and the lingering influence of the woman who brought them together.

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Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy Learned to Love Reading Through Mickey Mouse

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, and more. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he spent six years as a political prisoner in Egypt after being arrested alongside his father at a protest when he was seventeen.

In his debut memoir, ElGendy recounts those years of incarceration and the refuge he found in reading and writing. Moving beyond the conventions of a prison memoir, Huna explores family, friendship, language, resistance, and what it means to remain when hope itself may not be enough.

ElGendy answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his book.

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Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

Kate Riley is reading a fat stack of Susan Orleans

Kate Riley’s debut book, Ruth, is about Ruth.

Ruth grows up in an insular Christian communist community where private property is forbidden, daily routines are acts of prayer, and questioning the world around her is discouraged. Told in glimpses across her childhood, marriage, and motherhood, the novel follows Ruth as her persistent curiosity collides with a life built on faith, conformity, and holy mystery, asking what it truly means to be happy and to live a meaningful life.

It was one of the titles I wish I’d gotten around to reading last year, but missed. Now, her debut is out in paperback, so we caught up with Riley so she could answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A.

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

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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Luke Larkin Thinks You Should Read Octavia Butler Early and Often

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

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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See the cover for All of Us Wildflowers by Tria Wen

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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