(Little, Brown and Company, 2001) Every cover design has its challenges, but I remember this cover as being particularly daunting. After reading Rick’s short story “Demonology” for the first time, I was so affected by it that I actually read it to my to my girlfriend (now wife) over the telephone that evening. I (Rick) made her cry. Also adding to the difficulty was that, in this case, the cover had to work for a collection of different short stories. So I […]

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(Bloomsbury, 2012) I’ve been incredibly lucky thus far vis-à-vis book covers. My first book, The Half-Life, featured a painting by my close friend Mike Brophy, and my second book, Livability, featured a painting by another friend, Chris Johanson. In both cases, the artists were integral to the inspiration of the fiction and so the appearance of their art on the cover helped complete the whole circuit in my mind.    In this new book, Rain Dragon, I was lucky enough to work with yet another friend, […]

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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) For many months The Submission had a different cover entirely (it’s on the galley) which had appealing elements but didn’t seem to cohere. Perhaps I had been spending too much time with my characters, but I kept thinking, This is not a cover of which Mo—Mohammad Khan, the stubborn architect at the center of The Submission—would approve. Then, at the proverbial last minute, FSG hired a new creative director, Rodrigo Corral, and I was invited to look at […]

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(Harper, 2003) Never Mind the Pollacks was the second of Neal Pollack’s swaggering, impertinent, scene-crashing impersonations. His first was the send up of testosterone-sodden literary pomposity, The Neal Pollack Anthology Of American Literature. (Not gracing your bookshelf? Goodness gracious. The book is a cavalcade of brilliantly crafted bookish smart-aleckery. A total delight.  Treat yourself…really.) In Pollacks, he hijacks the persona of beloved rock critic Lester Bangs and proceeds to stumble and careen through decades of rock history, lore, and criticism, […]

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(Knopf, 2012) When I finished writing The Flame Alphabet, Tom McCarthy’s novel C had just come out, with a dazzling jacket by Peter Mendelsund. This confirmed what I’d been suspecting: Mendelsund is a tremendously strong, intuitive designer. I’d already drooled over a few of his jackets, including the Kafka reprints he recently completed.    And then when I met him, and we spoke a bit, I learned he was a passionate reader, a deep reader. He knew The Flame Alphabet […]

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(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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