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Tag: holly macdonald

Book Covers of Note, February 2022

Here are your February book covers of note…

Anonymous Sex edited by Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan; design Holly MacDonald; illustration Malika Favre (The Borough Press / February 2022)

Malika Favre also designed and illustrated the cover of Playing with Matches by Michael Faudet, published by Andrews McMeel at the end of last year, and featured in this month’s ‘Book Covers We Love‘ post at Spine Magazine.

Catch the Sparrow by Rachel Rear; design by Mia Kwon (Bloomsbury / February 2022)

I like Mia Kwon’s cover for Breath Better Spent by Damaris B. Hill, published by Bloomsbury last month, too…

The Colony by Audrey Magee; design by Jack Smyth (Faber & Faber / February 2022)

The cover of the US edition, available from FSG in May, was design by Jaya Miceli:

The Delivery by Peter Mendelsund; design by Chloe Scheffe (Picador USA / February 2022)

Alex Merto‘s design for the hardcover was one of my notable book covers of the year in 2021:

The Go-Between by Osman Yousefzada; design by Gill Heeley (Canongate / January 2022)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu; design by Jaya Miceli (Tin House / February 2022)

New Animal by Ella Baxter; design by Ami Smithson; photograph by Alfonso Vidal-Quadras (Picador / February 2022)

The fruity cover of the Australian edition published by Allen and Unwin last year was designed by Akiko Chan, while the hot pink US edition was designed in-house by Eric Obenauf at Two Dollar Radio I believe.

Path of Totality by Niina Pollari; design by Michael Salu (Soft Skull / February 2022)

The Perfect Sound by Garrett Hongo; design by John Gall (Pantheon / February 2022)

Pure Colour by Sheila Heti; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2022)

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka; design by Gabriele Wilson (Knopf / February 2022)

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso; design by Leanne Shapton (Hogarth / February 2022)

Watergate by Garrett M. Graff; design by Alison Forner (Avid Reader Press / February 2022)

For obvious reasons, this brought to mind Paul Sahre‘s cover for the novel Watergate by Thomas Mallon from a few (10?? OMG) years back.

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Something for the Weekend

Holly MacDonald is Assistant Art Director at Bloomsbury in London. She has some of her own lovely cover designs on her blog.

Losing the Knack — Stephen King talks about his creative process and the current state of short fiction at The Atlantic:

I’ve got a perspective of being a short-story reader going back to when I was 8 or 9 years old. At that time there were magazines all over the place. There were so many magazines publishing short fiction that nobody could keep up with it. They were just this open mouth going “Feed me! Feed me!” The pulps alone, the 15- and 20-cent pulps, published like 400 stories a month, and that’s not even counting the so-called “slicks” — Cosmopolitan, American Mercury. All those magazine published short fiction. And it started to dry up. And now you can number literally on two hands the number of magazines that are not little presses that publish short fiction… You don’t see people on airplanes with their magazines folded open to Part 7 of the new Norman Mailer. He’s dead of course, but you know what I mean. And all of these e-books and this computer stuff, it kind of muddies the water and obscures the fact that people just don’t read short fiction. And when you fall out of the habit of doing it, you lose the knack, you lose the ability to sit down for 45 minutes like you can with this story and get a little bit of entertainment.

Also at The Atlantic: Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Books, on how publishing has changed since 1984.

No Comment — Khoi Vinh, former-Design Director for NYTimes.com, writing on his own blog Subtraction about how comments and blogging are changing:

[B]logging in the style that I cherish — the Blogger/MovableType/WordPress.org style, you might say, where each blog is a kind of an independent publication — now feels somewhat like a niche activity practiced by relatively few, where it once seemed like a revolutionary democratization of publishing. What seems more lively, more immediate and more relevant right now is what I might call ‘network blogging’ — content publishing that’s truly integrated into a host network like Tumblr or Twitter, that’s not just on the network, it’s of the network too. It’s simpler, faster, more democratic than what came before. It’s not my preferred style of blogging, but it’s hard to acknowledge that it’s not incredibly exciting in very different ways.

Part of this change, I think, is a decline in commenting… [T]here are much more absorbing content experiences than independent blogs out there right now: not just Tumblr, but Twitter and Facebook and all sorts of social media, too, obviously, and they’re drawing the attention that the ‘old’ blogs once commanded. Moreover, these social networks allow people to talk directly to one another rather than in the more random method that commenting on a blog post allows; why wouldn’t you prefer to carry on a one-on-one conversation with a friend rather than hoping someone reads a comment you’ve added to a blog post…?

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