(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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(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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