Christopher Payne was en route through Brooklyn on his way to the MTA Overhaul Shop in Coney Island, where they rebuild and maintain subway cars. As he passed storefronts, bodegas, and restaurants, he commented, “‘STEAKS, CHOPS, SEAFOOD’—you don’t see that on the signs for diners anymore.” Payne is renowned for his photographs documenting industry in America. When he creates images of things being produced, he feels the urgency of knowing that all manufacturing processes change and disappear over time. He conveys the power and beauty of making things. All sorts of things: Steinway pianos, Whirlpool washing machines, Kohler urinals, Airbus planes, and electric vehicles shuttling down the assembly lines at Ford and Rivian. His focus ranges from traditional processes serving niche markets to ultramodern technologies.

Payne had photographed in the MTA Overhaul Shop several times already. In the cavernous skylighted space, he had the swagger of someone who understands the work done there, which won the respect of the workers. They knew from previous shoots the exactitude and precision—the eccentricity—he exhibits when composing a photograph. In his steel-toed boots and hard hat, Payne stalked the aisles lined with trains like a museum curator searching for treasures to put on display. Today his mind was set on a forty-ton subway car. He wanted to document the moment when the train is hoisted into the air to facilitate work on its undercarriage. Payne envisioned a moment when the elevated car would align with the car behind it in a way that would be deeply satisfying. This moment of geometric and compositional sublimity had eluded him so far. He is a perfectionist.

There is nothing loose or improvisatory about Payne’s work. As we entered the shop that morning, he said, “We’re going to get medical with this—like, surgical.” He will return to the same location five or even ten times in pursuit of an imagethat is escaping him or to redo an image he thinks he can do better. That’s what he was up to this day in Brooklyn. He set up his tripod and, as he was shooting, he directed the men moving the car into position to lift it a few inches higher here or drop it a few inches there. They endured several rounds of his requests because, as much as he admires the tremendous skill they bring to their labors, they seemed to admire the obsessive, sometimes baffling perfectionism he brings to his art. At one point, as he kept honing the exact composition he wanted, he said, “I don’t know if I am chasing something that is unattainable.”

Red/blue editing pencils before dunking in blue paint. General Pencil Company, Jersey City, New Jersey

It was thrilling to see the colossal subway car handled like a toy. Scale plays a major role in Payne’s work. Pencils in a factory in Jersey City look monumental, and a row of airplane fuselages on an assembly line in Wichita, Kansas, looks tiny. He shoots behemoths like nuclear submarines, wind turbines, and printing presses with the same flair and eye for detail he brings to shooting tiny fiber optics and computer innards. The steel-and-copper hatch of a nautical submarine could be, at first glance, a watch component. One of his most delightful photos shows a man inside a huge New York Times printing press, engulfed by the tangle of wires, cables, and gears he is cleaning. Payne loves seeing humans inside machines.

Circular forms appear regularly in Payne’s pictures. A worker’s tiny legs peek out from below the huge steel sunflower of a jet engine. Rows of massive wheels are lined up in a locomotive factory in Fort Worth, Texas. Hundreds of spools of wire are mounted on the spokes of a gigantic orange wheel in the Nexans high-voltage subsea cable plant in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Chartreuse golf balls whirl- ing in a vibrating buffing chamber at the Titleist factory become graceful minimalist sculptures. One imagines him walking onto a factory floor filled with machinery and feeling the same jolt of inspiration that Monet once felt gazing at water lilies and van Gogh felt in a field of haystacks. The manufacturing world is Payne’s muse.

In 2010, a yarn mill in Maine caught Payne’s interest. The once-booming textile industry in the United States had shrunk dramatically in recent decades, and one of the main obsessions that fuels Payne’s art is the desire to capture traditional manufacturing processes before they disappear. The mill became the first of more than twenty that Payne documented throughout New England. One morning he received a call from the owner of the S & D Spinning Mill in Millbury, Massachusetts, a place where Payne had spent some time. The owner said, “You might want to come up today. We’re running pink.”

Wool carders. S & D Spinning Mill, Millbury, Massachusetts

Prior to that, whenever Payne had been on-site, they were running black, white, and gray wool. Payne, who lives in upper Manhattan, still chuckles when he recounts thinking to himself, “Do I want to give up my parking space right outside my apartment to drive three and a half hours to the mill?” Of course he did. He made one of his iconic photos that day—a deliriously pink sea of unspun fuzzy wool fiber stretched across a bank of gray rollers cascading down from the ceiling. The interlocking lines and angles formed by the grid of rollers, ladders, fencing, and vividly magenta gossamer fibers form a rhythmically harmonious composition that would hold its own against a rigorous Mondrian-esque abstraction if it weren’t for the unruly wool puffs wafting about on the floor and webbing down from the rafters. This fiber would eventually be used for hardware-store paint rollers. Payne is always ready to drop everything to go to a factory in pursuit of a color or moment in the industrial process that he has been chasing.

Even when the product being manufactured isn’t colorful, hints of cobalt blue, sunny yellow, and fire-engine red pop up in Payne’s photographs, thanks to factories using these primary hues as warnings and decorative accents. He waited months to get the spaghetti strands of blue pastel at the General Pencil factory in Jersey City. Gloved hands gently hold the soft material atop a stack of wooden boards cut with ridges to shape the strands. The scene is rendered with Payne’s classically cinematic Rembrandt lighting evenly illuminating the hands while letting the background fall into darkness. There is an air of timelessness to the image. Payne says it is hypnotizing to watch someone do a repetitive motion. When he was in one of the textile mills, he spent the better part of a day making a portrait of a man doffing a large spool of wool roving (wool fiber that has been processed but not yet spun) because he wanted to catch the moment of peak elegance.

This is usually the aim when Payne is photographing workers. He will labor over a portrait with the same fierce attention to minute shifts in position and lighting that he brings to his still-life images, trusting that he will have a chance to remake a picture due to the repetitive nature of assembly-line and factory work. The task will be repeated. He wants to illuminate and celebrate the skills of the workers and to honor their craftsmanship. There is no excuse for not getting it right. A tour through the Steinway piano factory in 2002 started Payne on his mission to document industry in America. He was overwhelmed by the beauty and delicacy of the artisans’ work and found himself thinking about it for the next decade. He eventually gained privileged access to the factory and began what would become a three-year project to show how pianos are made. He found it to be a “very meditative place,” and says, “When I saw them bending the wood for the piano around the rim press, I said, ‘Oh my God, that is the first step in the creation of a concert grand that will eventually end up in performance halls around the world,’ and I almost cried.

This is when the wood is transformed into the unmistakable silhouette of the piano. Before that, it is just planks.”

PEEPS Marshmallow Chicks cooling on a conveyor belt before packaging. Just Born Quality Confections, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The smell of wood was everywhere. Much of the work is done by eye with chisel in hand. A “belly man” literally lies on top of the sound boards on a table cut out in the shape of a piano as he does his work. Payne’s grandmother and mother taught piano, and his father was a classical musician. He feels this has influenced his photographic work. He originally trained as an architect and worked as one for twelve years. When the Recession hit in 2008, he found himself at a cross- roads, realizing that he preferred being in actual physical spaces to drawing the plans for future buildings. He turned to photography full-time, crediting his years of translating three-dimensional spaces into two-dimensional drawings with giving him a deeper understanding of form and function.

I first met Payne when Bonni Benrubi, his gallerist at the time, showed me his stunning photographs from the Steinway factory in the spring of 2012. We published those images in the New York Times Magazine, where I have been the director of photography since 1987. Since then, I have enjoyed working with Payne on numerous projects. We commission him because of his singular ability to make gloriously monumental photos that illuminate what he refers to as the “grandeur and sublimity” of industrial processes.

Three of the most memorable photo essays we’ve published—the textile mills, the pencil factory, and even the New York Times printing plant—were self-assigned art projects that Payne either brought to us after they were complete or asked us for help with to gain access to a facility; he had no promise of publication upon their completion. Payne, who sold newspapers in Boston when he was a teenager, desperately wanted to shoot inside the massive Times printing plant in College Point, Queens. After we granted him access, he visited the plant more than thirty times, often into the wee hours of the morning, to get the best images of the presses running and the press operators at work. Sometimes he came away empty- handed if things didn’t align visually in the way he hoped they would. This deep engagement with his personal projects gives him the granular knowledge of the manufacturing process he needs to make the formally beautiful and informationally meaningful images he seeks.

Warp yarns feeding a Jacquard loom for the weaving of velvet upholstery. MTL, Jessup, Pennsylvania

The biggest challenge Payne faces is an unusual one for an artist. He is obsessed with process. When he is photographing inside a factory, there is a constant inner tug-of-war between his desire to make the most beautiful photo possible and his desire to show how something works. He says, “I struggle with the burden to show process. To convey useful information as well as beauty. It can’t just be beauty. It has to have meaning.” It is a self-imposed burden. We published the photo essay of the Times printing plant as a special section of the broadsheet. A selection of the photographs he made now hangs in the Times building in Times Square.

Payne cites as influences the work of Andreas Feininger, the photographer who covered industry for Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s; Alfred Palmer’s factory portraits during World War II for the Farm Security Administration; the industrial photographs of Ezra Stoller (who was known primarily for his architectural commissions); and the pictures Joseph Elliott made at the Bethlehem Steel plant in the 1990s. Payne has grabbed the baton and run with it. He shares the appreciation of sculptural forms evident in Bernd and Hilla Becher’s seminal documentation of disappearing industrial architecture in Germany, of objects such as cooling towers, gas tanks, and grain elevators. The big difference between their photography and Payne’s is that they clearly had a formal agenda and Payne’s is both formal and humanistic. Payne also looks to Vermeer’s paintings for his portraiture because, he says, “I love the soft side light and the way his pictures are architecturally composed and ordered, with everything in its place for a reason.” Payne’s work will one day resonate in the way Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York photos from the 1930s do today. They will serve as historic records.

To succeed, photographers need to be opinionated. Payne’s photographs declare with clarity and passion his belief that American manufacturing is to be treasured and valued and the workers respected and honored with our attention. The hard labor of these workers has been documented by one of the finest documentary artists of our time. This book should be the topping-out ceremony that occurs when the highest feature on a tall building is attached to celebrate the end of construction. After all the work Payne has done in magnificently rendering the toil of the workers and the beauty of industrial processes, he should be able to step back to survey the breadth of his achievement, but as I write this essay, I know he is still trying to gain access to places he hasn’t been able to get into yet—a jet engine test site, a high-tech pharmaceutical lab, and a space capsule he has been dreaming about. There is always something more to photograph.

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Excerpted from Made in America: The Industrial Photography of Christopher Payne. Foreword by Kathy Ryan Copyright (c) 2023 Abrams Books. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Another month of books, another month of book covers. October is (arguably, I guess) both the best month of the year and the weirdest. The covers, naturally, follow suit. Here are my favorites from this year’s spooky season:

Guy Gunaratne, Mister, Mister; cover design by Jack Smyth (Pantheon, October 3)

Very cool mixed media collage, and even cooler custom text. Also, I’d like to say to the gentleman on this cover: hard same, man.

Athena Dixon, The Loneliness Files; cover design by Beth Steidle (Tin House, October 3)

“It is hard to visually represent loneliness in a way that does not skew towards the familiar—white expanses, empty rooms, curtains and windows, vases without flowers,” Steidle told Lit Hub. “And while those images successfully convey their message, this book is modern and urgent, and needed a different approach. Modern loneliness is crowded. It is filled with bodies, digital and analog, with real life on one side and manufactured life on the other.” Read more about it here.

Olga Ravn, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, My Work; cover design by Joan Wong (New Directions, October 10)

My favorite kind of book cover: deeply—but oh so casually—deranged.

Jhumpa Lahiri, tr. Todd Portnowitz, Roman Stories; cover design by Janet Hansen (Knopf, October 10)

Crown shyness in vivid color.

Justin Torres, Blackouts; cover design by Na Kim (FSG, October 10)

“Explaining the concept behind the cover feels impossible and almost deranged because it’s an amalgamation of so many things!” Kim told Lit Hub. “The large black mass impeding the majority of the cover takes the shape of one of the torn pages from the Sex Variants Study (a book heavily featured throughout the novel). The application of black on black also nods to the stories within the stories, and the idea of shadows still existing in the dark. The peeking hyena is a character pulled from an illustrated children’s book within the novel. Like I said, this cover is a real hodgepodge of so many ideas and images, but hopefully it came together to create something cohesive and beautiful.” Read more about it here.

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind; cover design by Alicia Tatone (Astra House, October 17)

Something something psychedelic grim reaper—a weirdly perfect cover for the book at hand. (Plus, the scythe looped through the O is a tiny touch of genius.)

Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future; cover design by Alex Merto (FSG, October 17)

I always love Merto’s sense of humor—there is something so simple about this, and yet so brilliant, something so elegant and yet so silly. (And true story: I picked this book up off my desk because of the cover, and read it, and loved it. Publishing success!)

Ahmed Naji, tr. Katharine Halls, Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison; cover design by Sunra Thompson, illustration by Sophy Hollington (McSweeney’s, October 17)

It looks like the cover for an ultra-modern horror story—which in a way I suppose it is.

Reggie Watts, Great Falls, MT: Fast Times, Post-Punk Weirdos, and a Tale of Coming Home Again; cover design by Ben Denzer, photograph of Watts by Sarah Pardini (Tiny Reparations Press, October 17)

A delightfully weird book cover for a delightfully weird performer.

Marie NDiaye, tr. Jordan Stump, Vengeance Is Mine; cover design by Keenan (Knopf, October 17)

This is a very effective version of the double layer/ripped paper technique; the red dagger is a double entendre all by itself.

Greg Jackson, The Dimensions of a Cave; cover design by Rodrigo Corral (FSG, October 24)

I mean, we’ve got Plato, lurking in the clouds like a god, his left eye closed behind—is it? yes—half a CD. What’s not to like?

K-Ming Chang, Organ Meats; cover design by Michael Morris (One World, October 24)

“I wanted it to feel dynamic, like it was coming at you but also drawing your eye in,” Morris told Lit Hub. “I wanted to somehow portray or hint at blood in a more unexpected way that would make the view look twice. A red string, that the main characters wear as collars sparked the idea of the red string abstractly portrayed as foliage that the dog explosively tore its way through.” Read more about it here.

A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton; cover design by Alicia Tatone (Scribner, October 31)

A cover that feels gluttonous indeed.

Ludmila Ulitskaya, tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Body of the Soul: Stories; cover design and illustration by Sarah Schulte (Yale University Press, October 31)

So delicate, so lovely.

The simplest way to make a globe is to construct a sphere and paint it. The earliest globes would have been made of wood or metal, with the celestial or terrestrial map painted directly on by hand. Later, in the sixteenth century, hollow globes were made of thin sheets of metal which were then hand-painted. Mapping doesn’t lend itself to painting and lettering by hand, and cartography was in its infancy, so early painted globes were necessarily very inaccurate.

Later makers pasted blank gores onto the sphere to create a more forgiving canvas for the hand-painted map and lettering. These are called manuscript globes. The invention of the printing press meant that maps could be printed as gores. A silversmith or skilled engraver would etch a reverse map on copper plates before printing using a process known as intaglio, from the Italian word for ‘carving.’ In intaglio printing the etched plate is coated with ink, then wiped to leave ink only in the incised depressions, before being run through an etching press, in which dampened paper picks up the ink to create the printed image. Copper is a soft metal, so the plates lose their clarity relatively quickly; smaller print runs were therefore common. The effect, though, is very satisfying, with an intense character to the image. The globemaker then pasted the printed gores onto the globe and finally the painter would add color.

It was at this point that the globemaking craft became assimilated with the printing and publishing industry. Globes were after all now printed just like books, and since this time each edition has been referred to as a ‘publication.’ And as in book publishing, copying the map from a rival’s globe is plagiarism.

The golden age of the printed and then hand-painted globe coincided with the age of European expansion, reaching its peak at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In this period, as astronomical, geographical and cartographical knowledge developed apace, globemakers too were inspired to experiment and refine their art. In turn, the proliferation of printing presses made it possible over time to produce more globes at a less than exorbitant cost so they became more affordable to a greater number of people.

Nevertheless, the acquisition or commission of a globe was still the preserve of the aristocracy and the affluent merchant class. Because of the delicate and time-consuming nature of the work, a budding globemaker probably would have required considerable financial backing. Globes therefore were prized symbols of status and prestige.

Studying these venerable antique globes, it was striking to see how little the methods of manufacture had changed from the mid-sixteenth century until the twentieth century, albeit there is always a mystery about the exact construction and methods because so much is hidden under the surface – it was only in the last century that the rot set in. I knew that I had high aspirations but did not want to simply reproduce some sort of cheap faux-antique facsimile. Instead, my ambition was to produce a handmade globe that felt classic yet at the same time unusual, relevant and contemporary.

Bellerby Globes. shot by Tom Bunning for part of his ‘Crafted’ Series.

I come from a line of keen artists. My grandmother and my mother both loved painting with watercolors; my grandmother even taught it for many decades until well into her nineties. I have several of their paintings, although they are stored in my attic because, sadly, I just don’t share their enthusiasm for this medium; I don’t like the imprecision of the application, although more likely I don’t care for watercolors because I have never been very good at painting with them. However, in collaboration with the crispness of the cartography on a globe, watercolors acquire another dimension, allowing you to build up a rich color patina over many layers without obscuring the text. It really is a perfect match.

Watercolors were no doubt used on the finest old globes for this reason; indeed, I would go so far as to say they could have been invented for globemaking had they not been conceived centuries earlier than the first painted globe. Globemakers must surely always have planned to paint their globes with watercolors; they knew their creation would have pride of place in the purchaser’s house, so beauty was paramount. We might love the look of these old globes now, but when they were made, they were positively revered. Meanwhile Chiara Perano, a friend of Jade’s obsessed with astrology and mythology, had been designing a celestial globe, mapping the stars and drawing all eighty-eight constellations by hand. She also decided that my original basic cartouche was not suitable for her celestial globe, and she quickly came up with a much better design.

In the early years of Bellerby & Co., my approach to publicity and marketing was a little scattergun. Finding the correct person to contact at publications for editorial content was far from straightforward. I just fired off the odd email here and there, and occasionally the employee handling the info@ or press@ account would pass it on to the editorial team. Sometimes this miraculously resulted in some publicity for Bellerby & Co. globes, such as a tiny feature in House and Garden magazine.

Just as Chiara was finishing the first Bellerby & Co. celestial globe, the Perano Celestial model, David Balfour, the property expert on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning movie Hugo, saw the House and Garden piece and commissioned me to make four globes for a scene in the film, one of which was to be a celestial globe in two pieces; they were going to film the scene in a clockmaker’s studio, so our globes fitted the bill.

The deadline for the Hugo globes was ridiculously tight – filming was due to start in June 2010, and I had to build in extra time for their in-house approval. And I was still learning many of the processes and practicing only on 50-centimeter globes; the commission was for a 40-centimeter celestial globe and three much smaller terrestrials. I worked into the night for weeks for next to nothing – I was just excited to be asked.

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Excerpted from The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft by Peter Bellerby. Copyright (c) 2023 Bloomsbury Publishing. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for C. Michelle Lindley’s debut novel, The Nude, which will be published by Atria in June. Here’s a little bit about the book from the publisher:

A gripping, provocative, and sensual debut novel about an art historian who journeys to a Greek island to acquire a found sculpture for an American museum and quickly becomes immersed in a cultural tug-of-war and, soon after, tangled in a love affair with her translator and his wife.

An island off the southern coast of Greece. 1999. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history.

Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island’s lushness—its heat and light, its textures and tastes—take hold of Elizabeth. And when she’s introduced to her translator’s inscrutable wife—a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form—she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude’s acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth’s fate and the statue’s are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she’s played in the art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind.

The Nude is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural appropriation, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Kelli McAdams at Atria:

“Finding our way to this cover was an interesting challenge. I started looking at paintings, and as soon as I came across this watercolor by Scottish artist Sir William Russell Flint, I knew I wanted to use it,” McAdams told Lit Hub. “I love the intimacy and the honesty of it, how the women pictured seem blissfully unaware that they’re being observed, at ease in each other’s company. I liked the idea of cutting up this softness with something stark to convey the sense of displacement the narrator feels throughout the novel. Hiding the central figure’s face felt like a good way to emphasize the voyeurism of the image as well—the idea of seeing versus being seen.”

“C. Michelle Lindley’s debut novel is literary fiction at its best—beautiful, lyrical writing, emotionally engaging characters, with a strong and moving message at its core,” said editor Jade Hui. “I was initially drawn to this story because of Elizabeth, her determination to take control of her path forward, her gradual openness as she comes to a different view of the world and the beauty within it. What unfolded is C. Michelle Lindley’s shrewd exploration of moral boundaries and what it takes for a woman to hear her own voice after years of shouting from within herself. Seductive, propulsive, and entirely engrossing, The Nude is a lush, satisfying reading experience that will have you in its grasp until the very last page.”

“I’m grateful for the talented designer of this cover, who has created a timeless and mesmerizing portal into The Nude,” added Lindley. “The artwork is visually stunning   there’s a depth and emotionality to its beauty. An ominousness in the details. The extra white space above the title. The movement of the two figures, leaning both toward and away from one another. The seething waves. Even the color palette (that brooding red!) strikes me as portentous. At first glance, the scene might read as bright and blissful—aspirational, even. (Wouldn’t I like to find myself on that beach?) But on another look, a truer, stranger scene shifts into focus. It’s this sort of line that the novel itself seeks to blur—and I think the designers have captured it perfectly here. How much it conveys, and perhaps more importantly, how much it leaves hidden, too.”

The Nude will be published by Atria Books in June 2024.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, which will be published by Tin House in June. Here’s a bit about the book from the publisher:

From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth–from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on and care for what he can: his home and property, his alcoholic, quick-tempered and big-hearted friend Bobby, and his mother, Louise, who is slipping ever-deeper into dementia–he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, in a hunting accident–a death that he and Louise cannot agree where to lay the blame–Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is it his secret to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth?

From award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Beth Steidle, Tin House Director of Design and Production:

“Because Fire Exit is Morgan Talty’s debut novel, following his bestselling short story collection Night of the Living Rez, we wanted this cover to have a big literary look—bold and unmistakable, leaping off the shelf,” Steidle told Lit Hub.

To achieve this, I used large type, bright colors, and strong imagery. It is rare for a title to have only two short words, with the two being somewhat symmetrical in the shapes and width of the letterforms. This makes them perfect for stacking and filling the space, which was incredibly satisfying.

As an image, fire is an important element of the book and the bright red flames help to reinforce the title. To balance the overall design, I added the outline of flowers within the flames. This element tempers the aggressiveness of the fire and big type, and allows the cover to also reflect the book’s quieter features, its remarkable landscape and moving lyricism.

“I loved my cover for Night of the Living Rez,” said Talty.

This time around, the cover was being designed by a different art director, Beth Steidle. I don’t mean to suggest I worried, because I didn’t, but I was curious to see her aesthetic, the way she read the book, and how she internalized my words into art. I waited anxiously to see what kind of magic she would do.

At first glance, the cover for Fire Exit certainly pops, but the longer I looked at it, the more I realized it radiates, glows. I noticed the intricate detail—there’s a gentle yet ruggedness to the art: dots of color are missing here and there, the flames, in parts, look soft like feathers, and the purple-blue backdrop of flowers made me feel simultaneously safe and alert, like how could plants survive a fire? How could we?

So, what did I think when I first saw this cover? I felt the heat, not too hot—just right.

Fire Exit will be published by Tin House on June 4, 2024. You can preorder it here. 

Another month of books, another month of book covers. We’ve entered what is arguably the most exciting season for books, and so naturally, the covers follow. Here are my favorites from September:

Ida Vitale, tr. Sarah Pollack, Time Without Keys; design by Tyler Comrie (New Directions, September 4)

This layered, cut paper treatment is delicate and extravagant at once.

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?; cover design by Rodrigo Corral, 3D illustration by Danny Jones (Astra House, September 5)

What to even say about this glorious, insane book cover? Sometimes, the weirder the better.

Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum; cover design by John Gall Design (Other Press, September 5)

This reminds me pleasantly of those Nabokov backlist butterfly box redesigns (which John Gall art directed—gasp—fourteen years ago), but with a sleekly updated vibe.

Anne Serre, tr. Mark Hutchinson, A Leopard-Skin Hat; cover design by Joan Wong (New Direction, September 5)

This is just a really good idea, and plus it made me smile.

Gina Rushton, The Parenthood Dilemma; cover design by Rodrigo Corral, photo by Jason Fulford and Tamara Shopsin (Astra House, September 5)

I love the strangeness of the image, neatly paired with the cover text.

Yiyun Li, Wednesday’s Child; cover design by Na Kim (FSG, September 5)

(In real life, it shimmers.)

Victor Heringer, tr. James Young, The Love of Singular Men; cover design by Pablo Delcan (New Directions, September 5)

A simple, straightforward text-based cover that’s elevated by the color choices.

J. Michael Martinez, Tarta Americana; art direction by Lynn Buckley, art by Amber Cowan (Penguin Books, September 12)

Another cover that makes excellent use of a piece of art.

Laura Picklesimer, Kill for Love; cover design by Jaya Nicely (Unnamed Press, September 12)

A parade of pink torsos? Gotta love it.

Soula Emmanuel, Wild Geese; cover design by Dana Li (Feminist Press, September 12)

Another layered cover (in a shade of green you don’t see too often on book covers).

Julius Taranto, How I Won a Nobel Prize; cover design by Lucy Kim (Little Brown, September 12)

Now this one reminds me pleasantly of Peter Mendlesund’s Kafka backlist redesigns (only 12 years ago, whew). The coin makes for a very fun twist.

Anya Johanna DeNiro, Okpsyche; cover image: “Psyche Asleep in a Landscape,” by Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola, 1837 (Small Beer Press, September 12)

It takes a few moments to see the subtle shifting in the painting, but what’s really daring is that bleeding text treatment.

Nathan Hill, Wellness; cover design by Oliver Munday (Knopf, September 19)

Big and bold and beautiful.

Daniel Mason, North Woods; cover design by Anna Kochman (Random House, September 19)

“There was so much imagery to be inspired by in this book, it was hard to zero in one thing!” Anna Kochman told Lit Hub. “Originally this illustration was part of a panel design, using a few different images, but it was the one that seemed to call to everyone. I think the style of illustration and the amazing expression in the eyes of the catamount really suit the tone of the book, and when we let it stand alone it felt right.” It certainly does.

Luis Felipe Fabre, tr. Heather Cleary, Recital of the Dark Verses; cover design by Alban Fischer (Deep Vellum, September 19)

Macabre and brilliant.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitkin, The Wolves of Eternity; cover design by Stephanie Ross (Penguin, September 19)

This looks like a simple cover at first glance, but it’s actually playing with perspective in some really interesting ways—look for the sky behind the text, the light in the corners. Where are we?

Vauhini Vara, This is Salvaged; cover design by Keith Hayes, art direction by Steve Attardo (W.W. Norton, September 26)

Behold the power of a single, dynamic image (and the text treatment to support it).

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection of poetry, Return of the Chinese Femme, which will be published by Deep Vellum in April. Here’s a bit more about the book from the publisher:

An unabashed exploration of queerness, excess, identity, and tenderness from award-winning poet Dorothy Chan.

The speaker in Dorothy Chan’s fifth collection, Return of the Chinese Femme, walks through life fearlessly, “forehead forever exposed,” the East Asian symbol of female aggression. She’s the troublemaker protagonist—the “So Chinese Girl”—the queer in a family of straights— the rambunctious ringleader of the girl band, always ready with the perfect comeback, wearing a blue fur coat, drinking a whiskey neat. They indulge on the themes of food, sex, fantasy, fetish, popular culture, and intimacy.

Chan organizes the collection in the form of a tasting menu, offering the reader a taste of each running theme. Triple sonnets, recipe poems, and other inventive plays on diction and form pepper the collection. Amidst the bravado, Return of the Chinese Femme represents all aspects of her identity—Asian heritage, queerness, kid of immigrants’ story—in the most real ways possible, conquering the world through joy and resilience.

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Christina Vang, featuring a photograph by Grace Sydney Pham:

“The cover features a photograph of bingo balls by Grace Sydney Pham,” Vang told Lit Hub. “Building on the idea of money, gambling, and Chinese culture, the cover includes glittery gold text and a full red cover to look like a red money envelope. Throughout the book, circular graphics elements are used to resemble bingo balls and qian cash coins.”

“The still life photograph “Your Inheritance” was composed of various thrifted odds and ends: a Las Vegas cup and saucer, bingo balls from a bingo set, and a polyester satin fabric,” added Pham. “I enjoy frequenting thrift stores and estate sales, finding value in cast off, unwanted things, and assembling these various cast-offs in odd, nuanced arrangements. With this still life, I wanted to poke fun at the tension between saving money and prized possessions for one’s descendants versus gambling it away in the later stages of life. There’s an additional, personal meaning to this photograph and my photography practice for me; both of my parents are hoarders, and I’ve inherited this hoarding behavior, which I’ve tried to justify or redeem by taking still life photographs.”

“Return of the Chinese Femme follows my poetic tradition of riffing on Star Wars titles,” said Chan.

My first full-length was Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, followed by Revenge of the Asian Woman. And now it’s time for Return. My poetics have always been over the top and campy as hell, yet equally elegant and thoughtful. The architecture and ethos of Las Vegas is all the above. It’s no coincidence that Las Vegas is my hometown. My parents are Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong who always dreamed of making Las Vegas our home, ever since we vacationed there back at the turn of the millennium.

The day my editor Sebastián Páramo showed me Grace Sydney Pham’s photograph, I cried. He hit the nail on the head. The red satin fabric gives Bond Girl mixed with Old Hollywood glamour. I absolutely love the lettering on the cup juxtaposed with the texture of the saucer. But I’m most taken by the sentimental part of Pham’s story: the ways in which her parents’ obsessions influence her as an artist.

Nostalgia is just about the hardest sentiment to express. Designer Christina Vang’s decision for a full-on red cover, along with the bold gold lettering adds onto this sense of nostalgia. I feel like I am six years old again, with my parents in New York’s Chinatown, receiving red envelopes on Lunar New Year. Or maybe I am ten years old again, embracing the glittering gold marquee that lures me inside the New York-New York Hotel and Casino.

Return of the Chinese Femme will be published by Deep Vellum on April 30, 2024. You can preorder it here.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Amy Lin’s debut memoir Here After, which will be published by Zibby Books in March. Here’s a bit more about the book from the publisher:

Here After is an intimate story of deep love followed by dizzying loss; a stunning, taut memoir from debut author Amy Lin so finely etched and powerful that it will alter readers’ hearts.

“When he dies, I fall out of time.”

Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds’ move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy’s family. It is the last time she sees her husband alive.

Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment.

What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest accounting of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held “truths” about what the grieving process looks like.

Here After is a love story and a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis’ death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory. Its power will last with you long after the final page.

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Anna Morrison:

“Our only time is the body,” Lin told Lit Hub.

I learn this twice: first, when my husband Kurtis suddenly dies, and then, when I almost die, ten days after Kurtis’ death. His body ending, my body stuttering, the seemingly limitless pain of all of it, this is what Here After reckons with. It is a book as tender as it is raw, as natural as it is unnatural, as gripping as it is disorienting. As such, I envisioned a cover that was organic in shape, striking in colour, and commanding in presence; a cover that reflects the intensity, longing, and fragmentation so inherent to my grief.

I was most pleased to have Anna Morrison on board with this project as I have admired her work for some time. She has created a cover that elegantly realizes my hopes. In Anna’s cover, we feel first the sensation of it: there is the intensity of the red, as well as the red’s sharp contrast with the blue, all beautifully reflective of grief as a landscape of extremity: the heat of pain, the blues of loss. Then, the body: two of them, both stretching in a gesture of longing that is forever fixed—each diver is just beyond the other, him ever falling away into the realm of the beyond, her ever held to the realm of reaching.

I also really admire the ways in which Anna shows, in the different shading of the divers, how grief collides with life, with death, with memory—each touches the other in a way that leaves traces. This collision is, of course, an imperfect process, subtly shown by the softly misshapen circles. Finally, in Anna’s tilting of ‘a memoir,’ I find a fitting gesture to the ways in which grief-memory is always bent by its own making: the pain that renders memoir possible is also the very thing that ensures it is impossible to perfectly capture.”

“Creating the cover for Here After was very much a collaborative project between the author, myself and Zibby Books,” Morrison added. “Amy’s memoir is extremely personal and moving so it felt very important to have her on board within the design process. I loved Amy’s suggestion of using diving bodies (I had gone for a more abstract approach initially). We played around with the interaction between the divers, we wanted them to have a feel of reaching towards each other to give that sense of longing and grace.”

Here After will be published by Zibby Books on March 5, 2024. You can preorder it here.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for R.O. Kwon’s sophomore novel, Exhibit, which will be published in May by Riverhead. Here’s a little more about the book from the publisher:

At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant, young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to college sweetheart Phillip, in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is a glamorous, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.

Cracked open, Jin finds herself telling Lidija about an old familial curse, breaking a lifelong promise; she’s been told that if she doesn’t keep the curse a secret, she risks losing everything. As Jin and Lidija become more entangled, they realize they share more than the ferocity of their ambition, and begin to explore hidden desires. Something is ignited in Jin: her art, her body, and her sense of self changed forever. But can she avoid the specter of the curse? Urgent, bold, and deeply moving, Exhibit asks: how brightly can you burn before you light your life on fire?

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Vi-An Nguyen:

“Exhibit felt to me like a gorgeous exploration of contrasts: legends and reality, pleasure and pain, creativity and destruction,” Nguyen, an Art Director at Penguin Random House, told Lit Hub. “R.O. Kwon’s writing is incredibly vivid and haunting in the best way, and the novel is so very visceral. So it felt right to pair sharp, contrasting type with a bold photograph of an expressive body, an image with a graphic quality that makes you look, and then look again. I’m a longtime fan of R.O. Kwon’s work so it was a joy to collaborate with Helen Yentus, Riverhead’s Art Director, on the cover.”

“When, years ago, I first told my editor about the novel that would become Exhibit, I said I couldn’t say much about it yet, but that it was full of sex,” Kwon told Lit Hub.

“Excellent, it’s all I need to know,” she said, and we both laughed. But also, in a larger sense, Exhibit is an exploration of desire and the ferocious pursuit thereof, including desires having to do with art, ambition, living one’s fullest possible life, and, yes, sex. In some ways, I’m always writing for a person I’ve been in the past who feared she was wrong, bad, and evil just for wanting as she did. She felt, at times, like the loneliest person in the world, and I so badly want her to know she’s not wrong. She’s not alone; nor am I. Nor are you.

As far as the cover, Kwon added: “I hoped for an image with strength, physicality, confidence, and passion. This striking image taken by Eric Traore, and designed by Vi-An Nguyen, surpasses what I’d imagined. I love the sense Exhibit’s cover gives of a woman having a private moment. She exists as herself, perhaps outside expectations people might have of who she is and ought to be. I’m bewitched, too, by what looks like long hair flowing into paint, as though she’s also in the process of becoming art. It’s an image that my novel’s protagonist, Jin Han, a celebrated photographer, would love to see.”

Exhibit will be published by Riverhead on May 21, 2024. You can preorder it here.

Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Susan Rich’s sixth poetry collection, Blue Atlas, which will be published by Red Hen Press in April. Here’s a bit more about the book from the publisher:

Blue Atlas is a lyrical abortion narrative unlike any other.

This one-of-a-kind collection follows a Jewish woman and her ghosts as they travel from West Africa to Europe and, finally, to the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The speaker searches repeatedly for a new outcome, seeking answers in a myriad of mediums such as an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, and a curriculum vitae. The raw, often far from idyllic experience of a global love affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy is examined and meditated upon through a surreal prism. The Blue Atlas, a genus of the common cedar tree first found in the High Atlas of Morocco and known for its beauty and resilience, becomes a metaphor for the hardship and power of a fully engaged life.

And here’s the cover, which was designed by Mark E. Cull, publisher of Red Hen Press:

“The cover of Blue Atlas was one of those instances that was a collaboration between the author and the designer,” Cull told Lit Hub. “In this case, the author, who was full of ideas, had access to a wonderful image of blue-glazed pots arranged against a tightly cropped frame of Mediterranean architecture. Half of these pots are seemingly empty while the other half hold the beginnings of something verdant that is just coming to life. The color and form of the image and the design make for a wonderful piece of eye candy that will make one stop and look and compel them to pick up the book to consider what lies inside.”

“I love how this photograph in non-literal ways, encompasses my divergent worlds,” Rich explained.

The attentive observer notices sea green illuminated walls and four pots glazed in an alchemical, lapis blue. Much like the poems contained in Blue Atlas which chronicle my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa, then a quick move to Paris, a hard land in New York, then finally culminating in a sensual journey to Morocco—this cover conveys a message of travel.

It may only be me, but I believe the three-dimensional nature of these tall steps set against a rough-textured backdrop, hint at a kind of epic journey with shimmering highs and disastrous lows.

My quest for cover art comes as an object lesson in joy and despair. I find depth and dimensionality in this chosen image: young garden herbs living on the edge of a borderless stairway.

When I began my search, I had no idea what I wanted. I looked at at least a thousand images until these shapely pots arrived. While it’s true that I believe passionately in color and line, travel and the unknown, I didn’t understand that these beliefs would lead me to my cover.

After a long internet search begun on Pinterest, I tracked down the photographer, Niranj Vaidyanathan, a software engineer based in Bangalore, India. Twelve years ago, while on a holiday in Mauritius, he snapped this photograph. Not only did Niranj immediately allow me to use his work, but he took just two days to lay his hands on the original image and send it off to Red Hen Press. It seems fitting for a lyric narrative that takes place on three continents to add a fourth by way of the photographer.

My poetry collection, Blue Atlas, narrates events that span thirty years of my life, examining in multiple found forms a midterm abortion I had at 26. The poems borrow the shape of an online questionnaire, a freshman composition essay, a personification of the abortion question and other surreal strategies.

This book has taken me more than a decade to write. During this time, the titular blue atlas has stood in for my map of sky and sea. The landscape I inhabit in Seattle, Washington, on the edge of the Puget Sound.

Sometimes I look at the cover and think, if I could climb these stairs, where would they take me? Are they a pathway to connect me to a safer world? Can they bring me out of abandonment and shame? I believe they already have done so. Every time I see this cover, I’m filled with inexplicable peace.

Recently, I’ve discovered that the blue atlas cedar is a tree that originated in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. A nomad of a tree, the blue atlas thrives in many climates, including the Pacific Northwest where I live. Like writing poems, choosing cover art is an act of the imagination, of instinct, of desire. Ultimately, it is an act of magic.

Blue Atlas will be published by Red Hen Press on April 2, 2024. You can preorder it here.