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Book Covers of Note, September 2025

Hey. I hope you’re keeping safe and well. I’m posting this late on the last day of the month, but hopefully it was worth waiting for.

I will let you get to the covers posthaste, but before I go, today (September 30th) is also Orange Shirt Day and National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, so I would like take a moment to acknowledge and remember the survivors of residential schools, their families and the kids who didn’t come home. <3

All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh; design by Jared Bartman (Knopf / September 2025)

At Last by Marisa Silver; design by Luísa Dias (Simon & Schuster / September 2025)

Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill; design and illustration by Elizabeth Story (Tachyon Books / September 2025)

Awake by Jen Hatmaker; design by Elizabeth Yaffe (Avid Reader Press / September 2025)

Big Time by Jordan Prosser; design by Luke Bird (Dead Ink Books / September 2025)

Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive! by Melissa Lozada-Oliva; design by Luísa Dias (Astra House / September 2025)

I love that we have two grungy / pulpy covers from Luísa Dias this month…

Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell; design by Ben Prior (Abacus / August 2025)

The Collected Stories by Cixin Liu; design by Jessie Price (Head of Zeus / September 2025)

This is holographic foil just in case it’s not obvious from the above (and if someone at Head of Zeus / Bloomsbury is reading and wants to fire me a better cover image that would be great!)

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano; design by Madeline Partner (Vintage / September 2025)

With this and the cover of The Dilemmas of Working Women designed by Sarah Kellogg (featured last month), we may have a new sub-genre of ‘well dressed and distressed’. Are there other examples?

Possibly a different kind of distress, the UK edition of Discontent, published last month by Harvill Secker, was designed by Kris Potter using a photograph by Laurent Tixador.

Dogs by C. Mallon; design by Jaya Miceli (Scribner / August 2025)

Facing Infinity by Jonas Enander; design by Anna Morrison (Atlantic Books / September 2025)

For the Sun After Long Nights by Fatemeh Jamalpour & Nilo Tabrizy; design by Linda Huang; illustration by Laura Acquaviva (Pantheon / September 2025)

Great Disasters by Grady Chambers; design by Beth Steidle (Tin House / September 2025)

In the Green Heart by Richard Lloyd Parry; design by Julia Connolly; photograph by Albarran Cabrera (Jonathan Cape / August 2025)

The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee; design by Jennifer Griffiths (Erewhon Books / September 2025)

The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley; design by Keith Hayes; art by Jose David Morales (Flatiron Books / September 2025)

The Last Jewish Joke by Michel Wieviorka; design by David Drummond (Polity Press / September 2025)

Letters in Exile by Claude McKay; design by Jenny Volvovski (Yale University Press / September 2025)

Moderation by Elaine Castillo; design by Lynn Buckley (Viking / August 2025)

The Shadow of the Mammoth by Fabio Morábito; design by Jared Bartman (Other Press / September 2025)

Is the “blob cut-out” a thing? I kind of thought it was but then I couldn’t think of any other examples except maybe this Paul Sahre / Erik Carter cover for The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson from a few years ago, which is more of a collage really. Are they any other examples?

Swallows by Natsuo Kirino; design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf / September 2025)

The UK cover of Swallows published by Canongate last month was designed by Jack Smyth.

They All Came To Barneys by Gene Pressman; design by Colin Webber (Viking / September 2025)

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood; design by Lauren Peters-Collaer (Riverhead Books / September 2025)

Lauren also designed the cover for No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, which was on my notable list back in 2021.

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Book Covers of Note, July 2020

And here we are… This month’s collection of book covers and occasional notes…

Antkind by Charlie Kaufman; design by Jack Smyth (Fourth Estate / July 2020)

The cover of the US edition of Antkind, published by Random House this month, was designed by Tyler Comrie.

In the Beggarly Style of Imitation by Jean Marc Ah-Sen; design by Charlotte Gray; photograph by Ally Schmaling (Nightwood Editions / April 2020)

(Because I am of a certain age, this cover immediately made me think of Lady Miss Kier and her shoes in the video for ‘Groove is in the Heart’)

Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch; design by Janet Hansen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / March 2020)

The End of Everything by Katie Mack; design by Tom Etherington (Allen Lane / July 2020)

The Englishman by David Gilman; design by Ben Prior (Head of Zeus / July 2020)

Fraternity by Benjamin Nugent; design by Rodrigo Corral; lettering by Michael Schmelling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / July 2020)

Lampedusa by Steven Price; design by Ami Smithson (Picador / February 2020)

Last One Out Shut Off the Lights by Stephanie Soileau; design by Lucy Kim; photograph by Marc St. Gil (Little Brown & Co / July 2020)

Maybe someone has done this before and I didn’t notice (or, more likely forgotten), but it’s great to see a photograph from the EPA’s remarkable DOCUMERICA Project — available through the US National Archives on Flickr — on a book cover.

Natural History by Carlos Fonseca; design by Pablo Delcan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / July 2020)

I love this cover. It reminded me Peter Mendelsund’s bonkers cover for C by Tom McCarthy:

On Nostalgia by David Berry; design by Raymond Biesinger (Coach House Books / July 2020)

The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell; design by Stephanie Ross (Penguin Press / July 2020)

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue; design by Sara Wood (Little Brown & Co / July 2020)

The cover of the UK edition, published this month by Picador, was designed by Ami Smithson:

Putin’s People by Catherine Belton; design by Chris Allen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux / June 2020)1

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld; design by Jo Thomson (Doubleday / July 2020)

It’s interesting that the US cover of Rodham is essentially the same as the UK one. I would’ve thought for sure that they would take different approaches.

Sensation Machines by Adam Wilson; design by David Litman (Soho Press / July 2020)

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