April 1, 2010
So, hey, I’ve been doing this writey bloggy thing for over a year now. Woot!
I wrote my first-ever post (cleverly entitled “First!”) on March 26, 2009. In that post I wrote mainly about Carol Bly and the book of essays, Letters from the Country, from which I took the name of this blog.
This jumps out at me:
Many of Carol’s schemes for improvement seem rather hopeless and naive. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that the whole culture could be reformed just by having Enemy Evenings everywhere every month? Nice to think of, except that I’ve been to an Enemy Evening or two (called by a different name, of course), and I’m pretty sure no one convinced anyone of anything. In fact, in my experience, the various sides bring their peeps, and the audience breaks up into “us” vs. “them” camps, reinforcing the kind of thinking that Carol intended the Enemy Evenings to cure. Of course, maybe the point is that these things need to happen more often.
After the town halls, the protests, the invective, the violent rhetoric, and the open-carry demonstrations of the last 12 tumultuous months, I’m thoroughly convinced that one of Carol’s Enemy Evenings would end in fisticuffs or gunfire–or possibly tarring and feathering. I’m officially pulling the plug on the whole Enemy Evening idea.
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March 23, 2010
Another installment of my sporadic series of rants and raves on book design. These’ll be relatively short.
These people look as if they’re at an air show. Todd has dragged me to any number of air shows. I do not like air shows. You stand outside in the heat with the sun pounding down on you and sweat dripping down your face, and your neck gets stiff from looking up at tiny specks of glitter flippety-flopping across the sky. Ugh.
The book cover’s quite good, though.
A similar design: photograph, people facing away from the camera, lots of sky, simple type treatment. I like it a lot. The typefaces are quite handsome.
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March 8, 2010
That cover design I posted a couple of weeks ago just never seemed quite right. I did a little more looking around and found some photos of an old globe.
I think I may have had a globe much like it when I was a kid. My parents gave me a Replogle globe for Christmas one year. That name always seemed so strange to me: Replogle. Almost, but not nearly, a rhyme with “global.” I remember that it came with a little booklet describing experiments one could perform with a globe. With a flashlight and a rubber ball, for example, a proud globe owner could simulate a solar eclipse.
But I digress.
Here’s my design-of-the-moment for The New World and the Old:
Don’t fall too much in love with it; by this time next week, I’m sure I’ll hate it.
February 23, 2010
A few weeks ago, when I posted a design for the cover of my novel-in-progress, I said it was way too soon to be thinking about such things, and sure enough, I’m thiiiiis close to changing the title. And even though I am, therefore (ergo and to wit), on the very verge of proving that it is, indeed, too soon to be considering cover designs, I’ve spent a little time today putting together this cover design:
I’ve had this new title rattling around in my head for a while. I first intended it for a different project, a play that I’ll probably never write. For a while it was attached to a different novel that I may or may not write. But–for the moment, at least–I think it belongs with the novel I’m writing now. At least three overlapping, interconnected story lines will incorporate events spanning some forty-odd years. The thing as a whole is shaping up to be about transition and transformation, about examining the past in order to find a way forward.
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February 5, 2010
Wow. It’s been almost six months since I did one of these. The long hiatus may have something to do with the fact that during the fall my coffee consumption dropped dramatically. I stopped punctuating all of my errands with stops at either Starbucks or the B&N. Or maybe I’m just a slacker.
In any case, without further ado…
Let me begin with a favorite author, Anne Tyler. Although I don’t really remember how I “discovered” Ian McEwan or Jane Smiley or Barbara Kingsolver or many of the authors I love the bestest, I remember very clearly running across a copy of Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a Kmart. I bought it because the title and cover art intrigued me.
Sad, then, that in recent years her book covers have come to look like this:
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January 17, 2010
I know it’s way, way too early for this, but I’ve already started playing around with cover designs for my novel-in-progress. Here’s what I’ve got so far (click for a high-res PDF):
It’s a study in white space, this cover. The great expanses of emptiness signify the loneliness, the futility, of daily existence. The key–islanded as it is within those ample tracts of nothingness–symbolizes our conviction that we know what we think we know, that we are what we think, that the unknowable is, in fact, knowable. The title and the author’s name are motion-blurred–smudged a smidgen–betokening the unfathomable speed of life’s passing. Years melt away into the void, faster than we care to admit, and all along the way we convince ourselves that we hold the key to understanding.
Actually, that’s all pretty much BS. I just pushed some pixels around until I found something I liked.
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September 12, 2009
I think I’m kind of getting close to the vicinity of the neighborhood of having a paperback cover design that I can live with. The time is growing very, very near when I will actually send the thing in. After that it will be awkward to make changes. I very much want to avoid having a cover that makes me cringe every time I look at it–especially if it’s some tiny detail that I overlooked that induces the cringing.
Shorter version of the above: I’m being obsessive.
The front cover is the same as it’s always been. Here’s what I’ve got at the moment for the back cover:
As before, click to get the full-res PDF.
I’ve spent so much time tweaking those three images–and, for that matter, choosing new images for one reason or another–that I can’t even see them any more. I suppose–once again–I’ll have to set this aside for a day or two and come back to it.
* Yes, it’s from a Bruce Springsteen song. Yes, I hate Springsteen with a passion. I couldn’t think of anything better, which is only fitting, since the same thing could be said of every lyric “The Boss” ever wrote. [rimshot]
August 31, 2009
That B&N gift card I got for my birthday is almost spent. I got a little impulsive last night and bought five–count ‘em, five!–books, four of which were in hardcover. I love books in hardcover, and it’s a rare treat to be able to buy a pile of them all at once without a shred of guilt.
Two of the newest five are debut novels by authors I’ve never heard of. Their book jackets did a bang-up job at being book jackets; that is to say, at attracting my attention and getting the book into my hand. I thought I might take a look at the various covers, then, in this special Birthday Edition of Under the Covers.
I’ll start with a cover that I’ve already written about: the cover of Colm Tóibín’s latest novel, Brooklyn.
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August 21, 2009
Pat Conroy has a new book out. Don’t ask me how I know. It’s just an uncanny feeling that I have. It came over me as I walked into the B&N.
I didn’t get a close-up of the cover. It hardly seemed worth it. As you can see here, it looks an awful lot like this sort of thing, or this.
I read some reviews of the new Conroy novel and a description of one of the Benton Frank novels. If you covered the author names and titles, you’d probably think they were two books by the same author. Oh, and Return to Sullivans Island is listed on South of Broad‘s page under “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” So, yeah, I’d have to say they’re pretty solidly in the same genre–whatever that is. Weepfest? Is that a genre?
July 31, 2009
After my special Gay Fiction Edition of Under the Covers, I got inspired to redesign The River in Winter‘s hardcover book jacket. Behold!
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