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Published October 13, 2016

Book Covers of Note October 2016

Busy, busy October… here are this month’s book covers of note…

aluta-illustration-shonagh-rae-ad-michael-solomon
Aluta by Adwoa Badoe; design Michael Solomon; cover art Shonagh Rae (Groundwood / September 2016)

American Ulysses design Eric White
American Ulysses by Ronald C. White; design Eric White; photograph © Colorized History, colorized by Mads Madsen (Random House / October 2016)

architecture-of-neoliberalism-design-daniel-b-gray
The Architecture of Neoliberalism by Douglas Spencer; design Daniel Benneworth-Gray (Bloomsbury / October 2016)

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The Best American Comics 2016 edited by Roz Chast; illustration by Marc Bell; design by Christopher Moisan (Mariner / October 2016)

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Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 edited by Rache Kushner; illustration and lettering by Jillian Tamaki; design by Mark Robinson (Mariner / October 2016)

birds-design-keenan
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier; design Jamie Keenan (Virago / October 2016)

Virago’s other new du Maurier reissues are also really nice:

The Breaking Point by Daphne Du Maurier; design by Neil Gower (Virago / 2016)
Doll by Daphne Du Maurier; design by design Gray318 (Virago 2016)
The Rendezvous by Daphne Du Maurier; design by Nico Taylor (Virago / 2016)

I wrote about the series last year.

chance-in-evolution-design-jenny-volvovski
Chance in Evolution edited by Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence; design by Jenny Volvovski (University of Chicago Press / October 2016)

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Darktown by Thomas Mullen; design by Craig Fraser (Little, Brown / September 2016)

Another entry for the sideways covers collection (although this is not a first for Mullen’s books — the US paperback edition of The Last Town on Earth, published by Random House in 2007, also has a sideways photograph on the cover).1

Oh, and the cover of the US edition of Darktown (published by Atria in September) was designed by Laywan Kwan.

design Laywan Kwan
design Craig Fraser

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Don’t I Know You? by Marni Jackson; design by Phil Pascuzzo (Flatiron / September 2016)

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A Gambler’s Anatomy by Jonathan Lethem; design by Gray318 (Doubleday / October 2016)

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Ghostland by Colin Dickey; cover art by Jon Contino (Viking / October 2016)

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Himself by Jess Kidd; design by Pete Adlington (Canongate / October 2016)

How To See design Peter Mendelsund
How to See by David Salle; design by Peter Mendelsund (W.W. Norton / October 2016)

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Known and Strange Things by Teju Cole; design by Alex Merto; photograph Teju Cole (Random House / August 2016)

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The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; design by Jack Smyth; illustration Pietari Posti (Virago / October 2016)

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The Mothers by Brit Bennett; design by Rachel Wiley (Riverhead / October 2016)

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Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; design Jonathan Pelham (Granta / October 2016)

Nayon Cho’s design for the US edition of Multiple Choice, published by Penguin US, was featured in July’s covers post.

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; design Jonathan Pelham (Granta / October 2016)

reality-is-not-what-it-seems-design-coralie-bickford-smith
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / October 2016)

This goes rather nicely with Coralie’s design for Rovelli’s previous book Seven Brief Lessons in Physics:

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / October 2016)
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli; design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (Allen Lane / September 2015)

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Results May Vary by Bethany Chase; design by Misa Erder (Ballantine / August 2016)

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Sirius by Jonathan Crown; cover art by Pascal Blanchet (Scribner / October 2016)

concentration-design-isaac-tobin
That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration by Alan Shapiro; design by Isaac Tobin (University of Chicago Press / October 2016)

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The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Chang; design by Kimberly Glyder (Houghton Mifflin / October 2016)

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The Wealth of Humans by Ryan Avent; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane / September 2016)

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Who Killed Piet Barol? by Richard Mason; design Sinem Erkas (Weidenfeld & Nicolson / September 2016)

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Wrecked by Maria Padian; design by Liz Casal (Algonquin Young Readers / October 2016)

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Published November 28, 2013

Teju Cole on Photographer Saul Leiter


Teju Cole, author of Open City and a photographer himself, on the late Saul Leiter at The New Yorker:

The content of Saul Leiter’s photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don’t so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. Precisely how the hypnotic and dreamlike feeling is achieved in Leiter’s work is a mystery, even to their creator.

Leiter died aged 89 on Tuesday this week. Read The New York Times obituary.

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Published February 16, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Deciphered — Designer Peter Saville on his designs for New Order, particularly Blue Monday and Power Corruption and Lies, at Upon Paper:

To me a record cover is part of the everyday, the now. And regularly there were phases of reference and quotation that – for whatever reason – I found relevant or pertinent. There were things going on in fashion or architecture that I would be aware of… things that I would take a reading from. I was interested in how the arts in general, but in particular the applied arts, were in some way evoking the mood, the appetite or the direction, the direction of the now. I always had a sense of what direction ‘the now’ was, it started with my own senses and then I would double-check and double-check to determine that what I was thinking was not merely insular. Around ’82 to ’83, I began to feel confident in my own sensibility.

Txtng teh Apclyps — The Guardian rock critic Alexis Petridis talks to  Nick Cave about this new album:

“Texting is apocalyptic on some level,” he muses, when the title of Push The Sky Away’s first single, We No Who U R is mentioned. “It’s a reduction of things. Maybe the last book, the last thing that ever gets written is just a bye, you know, goodbye in text speak.”

And finally…

Teju Cole on literature, Barak Obama,  dirty wars and drone strikes, at The New Yorker:

The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.

How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

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Published November 23, 2012

Teju Cole on Writers and Company

Author Teju Cole, author of Open City, in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company:

CBC RADIO Writers and Company: Teju Cole Open City mp3

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Published September 17, 2012

Teju Cole Artangel Books Podcast

Just to quickly follow up from this post last week, here’s Teju Cole talking to The Guardian about his stay in A Room for London and reading his essay about V.S. Naipaul and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

Guardian Artangel Books Podcast Teju Cole mp3

You can see some of Teju Cole’s photographs (mentioned in the interview) on his Flickr photostream.

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Published September 14, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Saw this in person for the first time at a bookstore  last night… Gray318’s cover really is outstanding.

Natives on the Boat — Teju Cole, author of Open City, on his stay in the Roi des Belges in London, and an encounter with V.S. Naipaul:

This boat of which I am temporary captain is named the Roi des Belges. In 1890, Joseph Conrad piloted a steamship down the Congo on a boat with the same name. That journey became his inspiration for “Heart of Darkness,” a puzzling novella with nested narrators who unfolded a shadowed, strangled, brutal tale. He wrote it in the last year of the nineteenth century and published it at the beginning of the twentieth. So, this perch on which I sit above the Thames—the sky is blue now, the hundred-and-eighty-degree view of it full of long stratus clouds—this perch in which the city is exposed to me but I am not to it, is an homage to Conrad’s bitter vision. What might it mean when the native pilots the ship? What happens when the ones on the shore, numerous, unindividuated, are white?

See also: Teju Cole’s diary in the Financial Times and an interview with Cole at 3:AM Magazine. (Thanks Peter)

SciFi Now picks 10 of the best Judge Dredd story arcs.

Wood For Our Coffins — Adam Kirsch on the modern rival of fairy tales for Prospect magazine:

fairy tales have a double relationship to poverty. They are poor themselves—in motivation, imagery, description, ambiguity, complexity, everything that makes for literary interest—and they are the products of poverty. This is clear enough from their social and economic premises: they are frequently  tales of hunger and neglect and child abuse. What we remember about Hansel and Gretel is the gingerbread house and the witch in the oven, but it starts out as a portrait of starvation and infanticide: “If we don’t get rid of them, all four of us will starve,” the children’s mother says to their father. “You may as well start planing the wood for our coffins.”

And finally…

Imprint reviews The Lustigs: A Cover Story, 1933-1961, an exhibition of covers designed and illustrated by Alvin and Elaine Lustig opening at the CVA in Saint Paul, Minnesota, next week.

You can see more of the Lustig’s astonishing body of work at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Flickr Pool

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