by mybookcover
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) I care a lot about what books look like, so when my first book was being published I was worried. I had been unable to find a single image that could be put on the cover to show at a glance something of the book’s heart. But then I didn’t yet know the work of Barbara deWilde, whose designs extend and complement the texts they envelop. What she did for Low Life is better than anything I […]
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by mybookcover
(Harper, 2011) I imagine that finding a cover for My New American Life posed, at first, a bit of a problem. I’m not sure that “a comic novel about an Albanian nanny in New Jersey during the Bush-Cheney years” automatically brought an image to mind. At some point (maybe I am imagining this) I heard rumors that the Albanian double-headed eagle was being considered. Around this time, I was asked to interview the painter Will Cotton for a food magazine. He […]
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by mybookcover
(W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) I loved it right away. My editor showed it to me in a dark bar—Barbès on 9th Street in Park Slope—and I fell in love with it. I don’t recall seeing a series of attempts, just two alternatives in the bar, and this was my clear choice. I like the fact that it’s both concrete, divided into sky and sea, and abstract. —Lydia Millet, author Ghost Lights is the second installment in Lydia Millet’s literary trilogy which started with How the […]
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by mybookcover
(Faber & Faber, 2011) I tried to imagine a cover for Love Goes To Buildings On Fire as I was writing it, but it was tough to fix on a single image that would represent the full scope of the thing, and I hated the idea of a photo collage. The best I came up with was a photo by Martha Cooper—who shot for the New York Post beginning in the late ’70s—of a kid playing trumpet alongside some ruined […]
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by mybookcover
(Scribner, 2010) Though mostly I try to work, play with my kids, walk outdoors, read Sebald and Anne Carson and Gogol, and generally not muddle up my life by worrying about the ways literature and capitalism intersect, there remains one thing I try not to delude myself about. A book’s jacket matters. How a book is dressed—how it’s wrapped, how it’s bound, how it’s covered and colored and presented—this can make the difference between finding the right reader or missing […]
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by mybookcover
(Broadway, 2010) My editor, Philip Patrick, asked me for some photos of my mom and I. I gave him three or four but knew he’d pick the Polaroid of us at the beach in Fort Lauderdale. It’s so perfectly representative of the book: us alone together, just as we were for much of her time in the hospital and at the very moment of her death; me looking off into the distance, having no idea of what was in store; of […]
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