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Join NOW!Over at the New York Times Book Review, Leslie Jamison and Ayana Mathis write about the excitement surrounding debut novelists’ work. “It’s like hearing an overture at the beginning of a symphony, the introduction of themes and preoccupations that will keep unfolding,” Jamison writes. Mathis says: “A debut novel is a piece of the writer’s […]
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Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature.
...moreThe stories are woven together with my life and my life moved across the globe as I wrote, so the stories too took that long journey. My map of becoming a writer goes all the way around the world. At Lit Hub, Ramona Ausubel writes about the roads that led her to her first novel, No […]
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Shawn Vestal discusses his new novel Daredevils, Evel Knievel, growing up in a mainstream Mormon family, and what he thinks of the American West.
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Lynn Steger Strong discusses her debut novel Hold Still, the influence of Virginia Woolf, unconditional love, and exit strategies.
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Martin Seay about his debut novel The Mirror Thief, the Great Work of alchemy, researching optical prosthetics, and keeping plot lines straight in a 600-page novel.
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Asali Solomon discusses her debut novel, Disgruntled, narrative structure, the mythology of memory and place, and returning to Philadelphia after years away.
...moreEmma Cline received $2m advance for The Girls, due out in June, which puts her near the top of a growing list of first-time writers with advances in the millions. Last year, City on Fire earned Garth Risk Hallberg a $2m advance. The allure of debut novelists isn’t always an economic issue: Given the amount of […]
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Heather Scott Partington reviews Bette Adriaanse’s debut novel Rus Like Everyone Else.
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For our ongoing Authors Guild series, Lori Ostlund speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo about what it means to live a literary life in the 21st century.
...moreWhile most debut novelists are seeing advances shrink, a handful of authors are seeing the reverse: million-dollar paydays. Consider Garth Risk Hallberg‘s City on Fire, released earlier this year. The 900-plus-page book earned a $2m advance. The novel will have to sell more then 300,000 copies to earn back the money. The Wall Street Journal […]
...moreElectric Literature’s editor-in-chief Lincoln Michel released his debut collection of stories, Upright Beasts, earlier this year. For the Quivering Pen, Michel explores the challenges first-time authors experience in writing and submitting their work to publishers: It would be nice here to craft a story of how those first publications inspired me to new heights of […]
...moreWith the release of his debut novel, The Land of Steady Habits, Ted Thompson considers why a compliment, in particular, increases the “residual shame” of publishing. At Salon, Thompson explores what it is he wants, especially when he is so skeptical of praise.
...moreJulia Fierro has a debut novel Cutting Teeth, but for much of the last decade, the writer was so dispirited by the rejection of her first manuscript that she stopped writing. Instead, she launched Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a Brooklyn-based writing institution that has helped introduce a generation of successful novelists. Only after years of teaching […]
...moreOver at BuzzFeed Books, Lincoln Michel asks Alena Graedon, Scott Cheshire, Julia Fierro, and D. Foy, who all just released their first novel, to talk about their writing influences, literary commitments, and elevator pitching their first books.
...moreIn the latest installment of Little, Brown’s “Ask a Debut Novelist,” Ted Thompson addresses the anxieties that spring eternal from the minds of new writers, perfectionism and the specter of Zadie Smith’s superior talent among them. While quality is certainly a worthy pursuit in writing, Thompson advocates a simpler and often more fruitful goal: say what […]
...more“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs to be driven by something very deep: What is essential about this story? Why does it need to be told, other than to begin the […]
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