(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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(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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