I feel like I’ve posting a lot about to-read piles recently. It’s mostly because I feel guilty for not reading more. Comic by Errant Science ..read more

Melina Moe, curator of literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, has written a lovely piece for the Los Angeles Review Books on the rejection letters Toni Morrison wrote while an editor at Random House: Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript … On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically of ..read more

Hello! I hope you’re safe and well wherever you are. Before we get to the covers, a couple of brief admin things. First up, there have been a couple of behind-the-scenes changes at the CO this past month. They’ve solved a few tech issues for me and hopefully no one else has noticed. Secondly, I’ve been tinkering with the RSS. I’m not sure that’s quite right yet, so apologies if it’s not been working as expected. Let me know if you’re experiencing any weirdness. I also wanted quickly mention that the deadline for the DPI mentorship scheme has been extended to April 12th. I’m not involved with t ..read more

I love this illustration by Klaas Verplancke for the recent ‘Style Issue’ of the New Yorker (which has a fun animated version of the cover on its website). It works on lots of levels, but it also feels like a bit of nostalgic throwback. People look at their phones these days (although I did see someone with a word search book on the Toronto subway this morning, so some people are keeping it old school at least). Grid patterns suit the cover of the New Yorker so well though. They work as a representation of Manhattan’s city grid and its skyline, as well as magazine layouts and puzzles. I was r ..read more

I enjoyed Joshua Hunt’s recent New York Times article on the Criterion Collection: Always in awe of auteurs but never in their thrall, Criterion producers have never been afraid to look beyond the biggest and most marketable names. When Criterion released “Peeping Tom,” a ’60s psychosexual thriller by the English director Michael Powell, the company chose not to ask Scorsese to record the audio commentary, though he would have been the obvious candidate, having done them for other Criterion editions of Powell films. The job instead went to a feminist scholar, Laura Mulvey, the author of the i ..read more

Alex Abramovich has a nice piece at London Review of Books on the late Tom Verlaine and the sale of his massive book collection: Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books – twenty tons or more – on any number of subjects: art, acoustics, astrological signs, UFOs. The sale of those books – a two-day affair in August, run out of adjacent garages in Brooklyn – was a serious draw. Arto Lindsay, the avant-pop musician, walked by. Tony Oursler made a short video and posted it on Instagram. Old friends, some of ..read more

Hey. I hope you’re keeping safe and well wherever you are. I’m going to keep this very short as there’s lots going on, but there some great covers, and a couple of tenuous comparisons this month (hey, I can’t help how my brain works!) . Enjoy! Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti; design by Na Kim (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / February 2024) Na Kim also designed the cover of Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour. American Mother by Column McCann with Diane Foley; design by Greg Heinimann (Bloomsbury / February 2024) Antiquity by Hanna Johansson; design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult / February 2024 ..read more

Every. Day. (Cartoon by Asher Perlman ..read more

I hope you’re staying healthy and optimistic about the new year. As this is the post about new 2024 covers, it inevitably includes a few from 2023 that I missed at the time. There are also a couple of indie covers, one from a university press, and, continuing a theme from last year, one from a Canadian publisher. Keep warm, friends. The Age of Deer by Erika Howsare; design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult / January 2024) Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino; design by Thom Colligan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / January 2024) The Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzalez James; design by Dave Litman ..read more

Happy New Year! I hope you’re safe and well. As is now the tradition, the first post of the year is a look back at some of the young adult covers of last year. The usual caveats apply of course. Not much YA crosses my desk at work, which is mostly indie publishing, and it is not a category I follow closely apart from what my kids are reading, so my insight here is limited. Still, I think at some of the stuff I wrote about the industry in my 2023 post on adult covers probably holds true for YA too. The toll of the past few years has led to a certain amount of risk aversion from both publishers ..read more