DebutsTag

"Raw and Real and Blunt" Hannah Green on Getting Sober & Her Semi-Autobiographical Long Poem, Xanax Cowboy

The long poem that is Hannah Green's electric Xanax Cowboy (forthcoming from House of Anansi Press in April) is like nothing most poetry readers have encountered. When an early version of the poem was ...

Artist & Poet Amy Ching-Yan Lam on Stories, Healing, and a Cheese-Based Universe

Stories are more than simply tales we tell ourselves and each other. They are lessons, conversations, cultural landscapes both collective and deeply personal – and in celebrated multi-discipline artist Amy ...

Anuja Varghese on Transformation, Literary Anxieties, and Writing for "Women Who Don’t See Themselves in Most Stories"

When it comes to genre, Anuja Varghese refuses to be penned in. Her debut story collection, Chrysalis (House of Anansi Press) is a highwire feat, balancing the surreal with the realist, the fantastical ...

Jonathan Garfinkel on Exploring the Legacy and Traumas of the Soviet Union in His Incendiary First Novel

Jonathan Garfinkel is known for his riveting nonfiction, including his celebrated memoir Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, and his work in poetry and playwriting, which have earned ...

Read an Excerpt from February WIR Trynne Delaney's A House Unsettled, a Ghostly Story of Black Queer Love, Family, & Resistance

Trynne Delaney's debut novel, A House Unsettled (Annick Press) is a spectacular young adult tale from the Montreal-based writer; part character study and part haunted house story.When the novel opens, city ...

Read an Excerpt from Chelsea Wakelyn's Darkly Funny, Deeply Moving Story of Grief, What Remains of Elsie Jane

Grief comes with a lot of "supposed to" attached to it. You're not supposed to be a mess. You're not supposed to ever laugh. And you're definitely not supposed to solicit a space-time wizard on Craigslist ...

George Lee on His Guernica Prize Winning Coming of Age Tale, Set Against the Cultural Revolution and Its Aftermath

In George Lee's Dancing in the River (Guernica Editions), Little Bright is only a child when China's Cultural Revolution upends his family and his life in a small, riverside town. As it wanes and ...

Debut Novelist Liisa Kovala on How the Finnish Concept of Sisu Informed Her Story of War, Family, and Alzheimer’s

Just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Soviets invaded Finland in a conflict that came to be known as The Winter War. No one expected the small country to survive the Soviet War ...

Sarah L. Taggart on the "What If" Question That Inspired Her First Book

In Sarah L. Taggart's stunning debut novel Pacifique (Coach House Books), Tia wakes up with a broken collarbone after a catastrophic bike accident and calls out for Pacifique, the lover she met just ...

Read an Excerpt from Patterson House, Jane Cawthorne's Captivating Novel of Early 20th Century Toronto

Jane Cawthorne's Patterson House (Inanna Publications) takes readers back to a Toronto of the early 20th century, a place of rapid change and brutal inequality still reeling from the effects of the First ...