by mybookcover
(Grand Central Publishing, 2012) I’ve had my ups and downs with my book covers in the past. Mostly downs, to be frank. I heard another author joking recently about how grateful she was that her book cover wasn’t some girl running through a field of wheat, and I was like, wait, that was actually my last book cover. I’m the joke! Ha, ha, ha. Hilarious. But still, I had high hopes for The Middlesteins. I was with a new […]
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by mybookcover
(Graywolf Press, 2013) When I’m on the subway and I see someone at the end of the car reading a novel; when I want to know what that novel is but can’t make out the author name or title; when all the foregoing and yet I still know what that person is reading—that is my idea of a great cover. Which is to say: for Woke Up Lonely, I wanted something bold. Something that felt designed. No photographs. No birds. […]
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by mybookcover
(Penguin, 2013) Being an artist and a writer, I had a specific vision for the cover of Glow: stark, strong, and allegorical, with a dash of mysticism, enticing readers to flip open the flaps and discover the mysteries held inside. Glow is a multi-generational family saga that takes place in a small town in the American South over the course of one hundred years. The main characters’ narratives spring back to a fictional progenitor, the great Solomon Bounds, pioneer and […]
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by mybookcover
(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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by mybookcover
(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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by mybookcover
(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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by mybookcover
(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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by mybookcover
(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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by mybookcover
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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by mybookcover
(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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