Debut Novel
Story Stream
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
On Michael Deagler’s 'Early Sobrieties' May 08, 2024
“Like all Irish Catholic families, mine was suspicious of admitted alcoholics,” says Dennis Monk, the narrator of Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties. This is a problem, because Dennis Monk is newly sober and staying with his parents in the Pennsylvan...
A Redacted Past Slowly Emerges November 17, 2023
Justin Torres’s debut novel, We the Animals, quickly became a cultural phenomenon when it was published in 2011, the kind of novel that appeared on social-media feeds and celebrity reading lists. The book is a marvel—it is slim and ferocious, and pro...
"Pineapple Street" by Jenny Jackson March 20, 2023
A deliciously funny, sharply observed debut of family, love, and class, this zeitgeisty novel follows three women in one wealthy Brooklyn clanDarley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected old money Stockton family, followed her heart, trading her...
A Conversation with Madelaine Lucas March 09, 2023
Madelaine Lucas’ debut novel Thirst for Salt (Tin House) investigates desire and its objects. How the former may constitute the latter—is desire itself what is desired?—is just one of the concerns that the book’s unnamed first-person narrator seeks t...
On the Mundane Letters of John Keats March 08, 2023
In my debut novel, Falling Hour, protagonist Hugh Dalgarno feels a similar ambivalence towards Keats. Hugh grew up as an autodidact in a working-class home. He has felt “haunted” by Keats ever since he first read about his death in a second-hand maga...
Édouard Louis’s Chronicles of Class February 08, 2023
When his debut novel caused a sensation in France, Édouard Louis was just 21. The End of Eddy (originally published in 2014 as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule) was an unflinching account of Louis’s difficult childhood as a gay boy in Hallencourt, a po...
Dizz Tate’s Novel ‘Brutes’ Captures Girlhood in Florida February 08, 2023
When you’re 13 years old, it behooves you to think in “we,” terms. There is something communal about your suffering and your obsessions; it is safer if you all hate the same person, or wear the same color of nail polish. Dizz Tate captures the sticky...
"Brutes" by Dizz Tate February 06, 2023
The Virgin Suicides meets The Florida Project in this wildly original debut—a coming-of-age story about the crucible of girlhood, from a writer of rare and startling talent.In Falls Landing, Florida—a place built of theme parks, swampy lakes, and sco...
Reality Check December 29, 2022
Sean Thor Conroe’s debut novel has garnered criticism for its disregard for literary conventions and amoral, self-absorbed content. The novel indeed fails when subjected to literary and moral scrutiny—but that may be the point. Conroe’s blatant disda...
On Jordan Castro's 'The Novelist' December 08, 2022
Jordan Castro’s debut novel places us in the writer’s consciousness so that we can experience the mundane with the galaxy-brained, his slow apartment rituals as well as his rapid, extravagant ruminations. The story is a morning ostensibly spent worki...
My Boyfriend, a Writer, Broke up With Me December 07, 2022
Five weeks to the day after my debut novel was published, my boyfriend, who is a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer. I’ve been a writer for a long time. So has he. Until this summer, he was unquestionably the more publicly prominent one. ...
Allie Rowbottom: 'When I Write, I Leave My Body a Little' December 05, 2022
“There’s no procedure, no pill, no person,” writes Allie Rowbottom in her piercing debut novel Aesthetica. “Salvation is incremental, a smattering of small braveries.” Set in the not-so-distant future when Instagram is as irrelevant as Facebook and t...
John Waters Has Still Got New Tricks Up His Sleeve November 14, 2022
When I ask John Waters why it has taken him until this late in history for him to write and publish his first novel, he replies: “Well, there were 16 feature films in there.” There have also been several nonfiction books. (Though he admits “nonfictio...
An Interview With Jordan Castro November 14, 2022
I read Nicholson Baker and Thomas Bernhard, and their books took place over the course of a short period of time. I realized if I did that, I could go anywhere I wanted and include a bunch of different rants and so on. I think in terms of making it f...
How to Kick Down the Door November 09, 2022
For a story ostensibly about movement, Aaron Burch’s debut novel Year of the Buffalo lives in the pauses. Brothers Scott and Ernie take a road trip from Scott’s farm in Washington to a promotional event in Michigan for a video game in which Scott is ...
What Sort of Woman November 08, 2022
By the time I’d reached the seventeenth page of Aesthetica — a debut novel about plastic surgery and influencer culture by the author and memoirist Allie Rowbottom — I had decided that it might be interesting to make a note of every use of the word “...
