An Exclusive First Look at Julie Buntin’s Famous Men, One of the Most Anticipated Novels of 2026
“He doesn’t remember me, but I know who he is.” So begins Famous Men, Julie Buntin’s upcoming novel—her first since her acclaimed 2017 debut, Marlena, became a darling of the literary world, earning finalist slots for both the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize. But the “he” in Famous Men’s opening line is not, in fact, the famous decades-older poet with whom the narrator eventually becomes entangled. Instead, he’s a would-be biographer, who’s equally intrigued by the famous man himself.
Buntin’s narrator is Wilhelmina “Will” Miles, a girl born and raised in Greening, Michigan, where she learns that the aforementioned poet—Nathaniel Fellow—also grew up in Greening and attended Rosendale Academy, where Will’s mother now works in the campus cafeteria. When a 14-year-old Will comes upon his old poems in The Rosendale Literary Review, she falls in love: not with him, but with what his writing portends. The poems provide Will an escape from an increasingly unstable life at home, where the eyes of her mother’s boyfriend seem to always be upon her. A nasty post-party rumor about Will soon makes life at school equally untenable, and she begins to dream of leaving Greening and tracking down her absent father. He himself might be a famous man. He might be Nathaniel Fellow.
But when Will does eventually land in New York City, where Nathaniel leads a coveted writing workshop, she finds not a father but an opportunity. As his assistant, her future blooms open: She not only has access to his credit card but also to the insulated world of writers that has made him a star. She wants more than anything to become one of them; all she has to do to make that happen, it seems, is whatever Nathaniel wants. And if what Nathaniel wants ultimately gets Will what she wants, who’s really in control?
These “friction-y, messy” questions, as Buntin puts them, first came to the author in a disorganized tangle as she was attending the MacDowell artists’ residency in the summer of 2019. “I was kind of choking,” Buntin says. “I was really struggling to write. My studio was in the woods, and it overlooked this kind of expanse of nothingness, and it had this giant window. I would be sitting in front of this window, where my desk was, with my light on, knowing that anybody who walked by would be able to see me. I had that eerie familiar feeling that, I think, every woman has had in her life of, ‘Who can see me when I think I’m safe?’”
To distract herself from this creeping sensation, she turned to books, and particularly to the work of Philip Roth. Reading Zuckerman Unbound, she “skipped dinner, laughing out loud in my studio. I mean, I loved it.”
She continued, “There was something about the combination of this vulnerable feeling and this fear—this very primal, familiar fear I felt in that space—with reading this dirty, funny, free, illicit, horny romp about a male writer having his moment…Those two things together did something to me.”
It isn’t difficult to identify these coalescing influences in Famous Men, which I described to Buntin as the kind of deeply immersive, pleasurable read that nevertheless made my chest feel tight. She nodded in agreement. That was how she felt writing the story, too, and wrestling with the questions it prompted. “What does it mean that I love and have really been influenced by, as a writer, these male writers who haven’t always represented women in the fully dimensional ways that I would want them to be represented in my art?” she says. “I was thinking a lot about internalized misogyny, too—what it feels like to be looked at as a young woman and how, even if you think you’re self-aware about what that means, you might find that the cultures around you push you toward responding to that gaze in ways that you think you have full control over, but maybe you don’t.”
She continues, “I’m interested in the most insidious way this kind of internalized misogyny might creep into someone’s sense of self, and how that might pervade their life even when they don’t think that it’s happening, or they think that they’re choosing it in a different way.”
Famous Men is not, Buntin makes clear, what she would describe as “a #MeToo novel,” though it is of course in dialogue with that movement. Nor is Will a perfect poster child for feminist enlightenment or post-traumatic healing. She often makes questionable, even outright unethical decisions, and her personal feelings aren’t simple to parse. She loves Nathaniel. She is also his subordinate. She knows this. She wants it. Doesn’t she? Who can say, other than her? “It’s not like people have perfect responses to exploitative or abusive situations,” Buntin explains. “Sometimes, their responses are messier and weirder and more uncomfortable than you think.” She continues, “I feel protective of [Will]. She was a hard person to be with for five and a half years [of writing her].”
The cover of Famous Men—which ELLE is exclusively revealing today—was designed by Oliver Munday at Random House, and features an image cropped from the painting I’ll Be Your Mirror by Meghann Stephenson. The woman in the painting, who bears an unintentional but slight resemblance to Buntin herself, is turning away from a mirror in the un-cropped version, having just applied fresh lipstick. She’s been interrupted by an unseen something or someone, but Buntin infers she’s not afraid of whatever she’s turning to face.
“I felt like Munday intuited all the thorny nuance of the novel and captured it perfectly in visual form,” Buntin says. “I love the riveting tension here in how the subject looks back at the artist, or even the audience, which picks up on a major thread in my novel. We usually think of the artist as the one with control. But is that right? Because it’s impossible to look at this image and not come away with one burning question: ‘What does she see when she looks at us?’”
Famous Men by Julie Buntin is out July 14, 2026, from Random House.