(Hyperion/Voice, 2012) No matter what cover I’m given, there will always be an initial period of panic because whatever my designers come up with will (of course!) not match the image I held in my mind for years and years. For Arcadia, I’d decided the cover would be an updated version of the frontispiece of Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia: woodcut-like, but with a brick Arcadia House in the center and maybe a caravan in the place of the boat. I loved […]

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(McSweeney’s, 2009) Toward the end of editing God Says No, Eli [McSweeney's editor/designer Eli Horowitz] and I started talking about cover ideas. I sent him a slew of lurid images from a book called X-Rated: Adult Movie Posters of the 60s and 70s, stuff with titles like Danish Pastries and Put Out or Shut Up, which seemed to irritate him, mostly because of the size of the images, which I think clogged his inbox. So at a certain point he showed me the work of a couple of different illustrators, and we decided on Kevin Christy. I think Kevin had […]

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(Henry Holt and Co., 2013) It has been ten years since my identical twin sister Cara and I posed in snow-covered New England, making the photographs that would become Kindred. The picture from the series that Cara called “Blizzard” was the only true portrait we made. It’s now the cover of Her. There was a Nor’easter the afternoon we took it, and almost impossibly limited visibility. From the comfort of inside, Cara watched me struggle in her front yard to […]

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(Knopf, 2012) I couldn’t have been happier the first time I saw the cover image. It seemed like a perfect visual metaphor for my book, which is very psychological, very much concerned with the “interior weather” of the characters. You can see the landscape inside a snow globe, but you can’t get there, so the image connotes both intimacy and separation. I think I only asked for one change, and it was for completely practical reasons. The first version was […]

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(Melville House, 2011) I can’t say enough about Christopher’s work—not only with regards to my book, which I adore, but about all of his work at Melville House. I consider him, quite simply, one of the best in the business, and there’s no one I’d rather work with. My book presented Christopher with a unique challenge, because it’s inspired by another book: John Muir’s beloved automotive manual (of the same title) from the 1970s. Muir’s book has a very familiar […]

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On Saturday, March 2, 2013, New York Times bestselling author and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jonathan Lethem joined Sean Manning, editor of the blog Talking Covers, at The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles for an in-depth discussion of his book covers. The event featured video comments from designers Amy C. King, Marc Cozza and Rebecca Cohen, and Miriam Rosenbloom as well as the unveiling of the cover for Lethem’s forthcoming novel Dissident Gardens, to be published by Doubleday in September. Here, audio and video corresponding to each […]

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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) Why do we, in our time-starved moment, still appreciate the media that ask for your time? Take as a principle, for a second, that novels live in time the way films and music do, asking you to spend an iota of your human existence with them, while paintings or photographs live the way many poems do, asking you to respond with the least verbal part of your animal hindbrain to the immediacy of an image. […]

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(Riverhead Books, 2012) The cover Americans see is the first and only cover for Battleborn that Riverhead Books ever sent me. I loved it immediately, and said so immediately, and that was that. My foreign covers were a different story: Lots and lots of neon lights on Battleborn abroad. Initially, I resisted the UK cover for no more sophisticated a reason than it seemed so very familiar: a book about Nevada with a neon sign on the cover. Wah-womp. Along […]

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(Little, Brown & Company, 2012) Soon after I sold Where’d You Go, Bernadette, my editor, Judy Clain, and I had the book jacket talk. I told her I wanted a bold, graphic cover. I then proceeded to jam her inbox with images of beautiful book jackets I wanted mine to be nothing like: ethereal women walking down gauzy paths, the sides of clapboard houses with peeling paint, the edges of windswept oceans with tufts of wispy grass, colored-glass bottles with sunlight twinkling […]

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(Hogarth, 2012) Even before I sold my book, I think, I mentioned to my agent how much I loved Rachel Papo’s photographs of female Israeli soldiers from the project Serial No. 3817131. I noticed them years before, and I think Papo took them close to the same time I myself was a soldier in the army. The details in them felt familiar, as if she was photographing my own service. Except she got to take pictures from moments in which an actual […]

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