For our twenty-sixth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five writers to introduce and interview this year’s group of emerging authors. These authors, though relatively new to the industry, offer prudent and clear-eyed insight, covering a wide range of topics: defining—and subsequently finding—one’s characters and one’s self, the benefits of a collaborative editorial relationship, the ways memory and imagination work hand in hand on the page, and much more.
Rabbit, Fox,Tar (Catapult, June) by P.C. Verrone
The Memory Museum (Graywolf Press, April) by M Lin
Hope House (Hub City Press, May) by Joe Bond
Hungered (Henry Holt, May) by Amanda Rizkalla
Burnside (Astra House, August) by Devyn Defoe
Eight More Dazzling Fiction Debuts
P.C. Verrone, whose debut novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar, was published by Catapult in June, introduced by Eden Royce, author of eight books, most recently the novella “Psychopomp & Circumstance,” published by Tordotcom in 2025. (Credits: Verrone, Jordan Villegas-Verrone; Royce, The Aneris Collective, LLC)
Folktales are elusive, slippery things, tending to avoid categorization even as they delight and entertain. Like the enigmatic tricksters of folklore, P.C. Verrone’s debut novel, Rabbit, Fox, Tar, is beguiling in the way it approaches storytelling: by not offering definitive answers but rather the possibility of new futures. Verrone’s observations are blisteringly accurate, as evidenced by his ability to create characters that reflect the dark, beating heart of our all-too-human nature while adeptly moving his players through richly crafted, multisensory settings.
A northern, insular town maintains a veneer of propriety while long-held secrets, jealousy, and rage simmer within its residents and beneath the land itself. I recognized Baby, a newcomer to the community, as the pawn she is in a game she did not ask to play and in her attempts to define her own destiny, even as she is caught between the desires of two powerful and very different men.
But are they truly different? Desperate to win a city council seat, each man attempts to use Baby for his own advancement, as she struggles to understand them and herself. This novel—clever, charming, revelatory—follows Baby, the Foxes, and Lucius “Lucky” Foote during the prelude to a local election as they navigate a town with a horrific yet inescapable history on the brink of resurfacing. As protesters gather strength and past sins are exposed, this novel reveals what is enduring about folktales: As we change, so do they, ensuring survival for us all.
African American folklore, specifically the tale of the tar baby, underpins Rabbit, Fox, Tar. What was the impetus for this novel? Did you read African American folktales in your formative years, as you were becoming a writer?
I’ve loved folklore and mythology since I was a kid. My family shared a lot of African American folktales with me through the Br’er Rabbit stories, spirituals, and our own family lore, but I was also raised on a diet of Grimm’s fairy tales, Native American folktales, Aesop’s fables, and Just So Stories. As an adult, I’ve made a conscious effort to learn more about folktales across the African Diaspora and research how our stories traveled from the African continent across the world, adapting and melding with stories from other cultures. This can become a thorny task because a lot of literature about Black folklore is mediated through white anthropologists and writers who are bringing their own prejudices to the page. Now and then you might find someone like Zora Neale Hurston, who was able to record stories from more of an insider perspective, but that’s rare. This novel grew out of my love for African American folktales but also that tension of white intercession in Black storytelling.
Do you see your book as being in conversation with other Black writers whose work incorporates folkloric traditions? Was it a challenge to bring this centuries-old tale to a modern audience?
Oh, absolutely. The first spark of an idea for this novel came from reading Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. My initial reaction to that book was how intriguing her perspective on the folktale was and how different it was from how I might adapt it. I get a lot of inspiration from reading or watching something and then taking that same prompt in a totally different direction. My book is certainly also in conversation with writers like Helen Oyeyemi, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Nalo Hopkinson, all of whose work I adore, especially when they’re riffing on folklore.
I tried to approach bringing the tar baby story into the modern world intuitively. When I was considering what the contemporary version of a trickster would be, my immediate thought was a politician, of course. There was an early version of the book where Baby couldn’t initially speak because the tar baby’s silence is so important to the folktale, but that became too restrictive. Then I thought, Well, what if she just doesn’t care to talk with anyone? That was a much more fun choice for her character. There were a lot of little narrative decisions like that, which helped me feel out how to make this story my own. The wonderful thing about folktales is that they are meant to change shape depending on the teller. This novel is as much about the act of storytelling as it is about the story itself.
You tackle a variety of themes in this novel, including race and class tensions, gentrification, environmental destruction, family secrets, and magic—all of which are tenets of the Southern Gothic tradition. Do you consider your novel as belonging to this genre?
I would definitely call this book an American Gothic, and many of its spiritual predecessors are Southern Gothic novels. But I wanted to intentionally set the story outside of the South in a northern, “liberal,” white neighborhood to show the unique ways these same tensions and themes emerge in those communities. That’s partly because I’m from California, and my family has been Northerners for many generations, so those are the communities I’m familiar with. I was interested in highlighting the midwestern Black communities that my ancestors helped build. I also think Northerners readily dismiss the South as being this horribly racist place, as if their own neighborhoods don’t have anti-Black histories—and presents. I didn’t want to let them off that easy, and I was interested in bringing the Gothic to a setting you might not usually find it in. Having lived everywhere from California to the Pacific Northwest to New England to the Twin Cities to the mid-Atlantic to Texas, I know that every city has a neighborhood like Original Hill. Every place has its ghosts.
Finding oneself—more accurately, defining oneself—is also at the heart of the book. How has your personal experience shaped how you present selfhood on the page?
So much of the book explores the characters balancing who they want to be perceived as versus who their actual innermost desires are pushing them to be. Each one is so sure the world will not accept them in all their complexity that they cage themselves in. I’ve often felt like somebody who isn’t easily legible, whether that’s because of my ancestry or identities or how I choose to move through the world. As a younger person, that made me very anxious, so I forced myself into a lot of uncomfortable boxes to fit in. I brought a lot of those experiences and anxieties to these characters—Baby especially, but all the characters have their own journeys of self-definition.
The times I’ve felt the most seen have been reading literature that points out how constructed and performative these definitions are. The novel begins with an epigraph from Hortense Spillers because her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” was so illuminating for me. Being a raced/gendered/marked person feels constraining because we live in a society that seeks to confine us, to divide us. There is a key idea in my novel that I took from that essay, as well as Morrison’s work, which is that you give power to the people you allow to name you. That idea completely opened up the story for me.
Talk about your journey from idea to first draft. How did the creative process differ from the short stories you’ve written?
The initial process started very similarly: A bunch of different ideas started to stick to one another. There was the idea of doing my own riff on the tar baby folktale, and at the same time, I was interested in writing about the neighborhood my grandma grew up in. Her neighborhood heavily inspired the fictional town of Sankofa in the book, this thriving Black community that is destroyed when the city builds a highway through it and displaces the residents. I had also just moved to Minneapolis a year after George Floyd’s murder, so a lot of my first draft was informed by the feeling of the Twin Cities at that time.
The difference came in creating the novel’s structure. I knew I wanted the story to unfold through different characters’ points of view, so I had to figure out how to interweave their voices and decide which plot points should be from whose perspectives. I was also able to expand on the characters’ backstories much more than I would in a short story, which allowed me to delve into what led each of them to this point where the soul of this neighborhood is so crucial to their definitions of who they are.
How did the book change during editing?
Well, there is a sex scene that wasn’t originally there. Ha! Most of the editing process involved my overwriting and then learning how much of each character’s voice I really needed. There was a draft where Fox’s chapter was twice as long, but then I realized it was kind of becoming its own story. The first full draft of the novel had forty more pages tacked on to the end. My husband read it and said, “You don’t need these. They’re not relevant to Baby, and she’s who I care about most.” That became my North Star, focusing on what served Baby’s arc.
I was very fortunate because my editor, Alicia, totally got the goals and the tone of the book. They were able to cut down a lot of wordy phrases into much cleaner sentences that communicated the same ideas more succinctly. But there were also some moments that happened off the page that Alicia encouraged me to bring into the text so the intimacy between characters could build in front of the reader. Hence the new sex scene. I discovered so much about the characters just by bringing those moments to the page.
An excerpt from Rabbit, Fox, Tar
Original Hill
The streets of Original Hill were alive with talk of the old man’s niece. The Bushes, the Reeds, the Woods, the Iveses, the Burdocks, the Thornes, and the Branches each had their own theories. These conjectures were batted around over girls’ night margaritas, during game night commercial breaks, and between over-the-shoulder glances at the grocery store.
It was Mrs. Bush that first spotted the niece in the second-story window of the house at 1 Orchard Street, though she had assumed the girl was a new maid or maybe a nurse. Strange, as the old man had seemed healthy enough the last time that she’d seen him. Then, the Reeds’ little boy spied her picking flowers in the Foxes’ yard and tossing them into a small wicker basket, a large yellow hat on her head. Mrs. Reed was sure that her son was mistaken, as it was unheard of for any hands other than Mrs. Fox’s own to touch her garden. Days later, Mr. Burdock noticed Mrs. Fox shouldering an extra bag of groceries from her car and offered to help her carry them. She told him that she could manage as she propped her front door open, and Mr. Burdock caught a glimpse of the girl within, wearing what looked to him like a billowing nightgown buttoned up to her neck and down to her wrists. Mrs. Fox shut the door before he could say anything more. Despite these brief sightings, serious speculation only really started once the niece began to sit on the Foxes’ garden wall.
The house on Orchard Street stood at the peak of Original Hill, overlooking the sprawl of the city and its other suburbs from a respectable distance. On clear days, the neighborhood’s residents could see the Mississippi winding its way along the edge of downtown and the fields of wheat and sugar beets beyond the city’s edge. Orchard Street was the aorta of the neighborhood, traveling down from the Fox residence past smaller but still splendid homes and through a quaint commercial square that they called “the Village,” which included a bank, a supermarket, a salon, a French café, a pricey Italian restaurant, a seasonal ice cream parlor, Burdock’s hardware store, and Bush’s convenience store. While the residents would have been happy for Orchard Street to stop there, it continued on, transforming into the Orchard Street Bridge and sailing across the I-94 highway. Municipal maps incorporated a few blocks past the I-94 into Original Hill, but the neighborhood itself drew its line at the bridge.
To call Original Hill a place alone would have done it a disservice, for Original Hill was a dream. It was—its residents assumed—the only dream. This assumption was corroborated by occasional features in lifestyle magazines and real estate websites, boasting that Original’s quality of life was as high as its average income. Perhaps its only demerit was its lack of diversity, though residents attested that it was easy enough to drive downtown and enjoy the city’s variety of ethnic foods and cultural arts.
The neighborhood’s name alone was like a conjuring. To say you were from Original Hill, or were looking for some place like that, would instantly conjure the image of spacious porches, pristine lawns, and quiet, well-paved roads. It was modern comfort without the over-digitization or trend chasing that soured modern living, the last holdout of a kind of life that every sensible person hoped would return sooner than later. It existed almost as much as a dream in the minds of its people as it did in concrete and wood and grass and tar north of the I-94.
It is possible that this is what allowed the old man’s niece to step into Original Hill from some equally phantasmic place. She took some time to fully solidify in the neighborhood, appearing only as a flicker in windows and doorways, which the residents may have been able to ignore had the girl not insisted on being seen.
On their usual evening walk down Orchard Street, Mr. and Mrs. Ives were confronted by a figure perched on the Foxes’ brick garden wall. She wore an enormous pale-yellow sun hat, from which two thick braids descended just past her shoulders, and a blush-and-canary sundress that billowed past her knees, stopping just short of two bare feet. Mrs. Ives thought the dress looked almost obscene the way it hung off her skinny figure. Its sleeves sagged around the girl’s elbows, and two bright white gloves met them at the edge of her forearms. Her wide eyes, full lips, and faultless skin reminded Mrs. Ives of a model she had seen on a magazine cover.
The girl had been staring into the nothingness of the road ahead of her before shifting her attention to the Iveses. She offered neither a wave nor a nod, just the intensity of those moony eyes. Mr. Ives nodded conservatively, and Mrs. Ives offered the girl a “Good evening,” to which she only smiled. Brilliantly white teeth, Mr. Ives would later recall. Like milk teeth, Mrs. Ives would agree. Then, the girl extended her bare foot out to them and wiggled her toes. The couple hurried past, trying not to stare.
From Rabbit, Fox, Tar by P.C. Verrone. Published by Catapult. Copyright © 2026 by P.C. Verrone. All rights reserved.
