Best of Young British Novelists

Martin Amis, Pat Barker, William Boyd, Ian McEwan, Salmon Rushdie. Iain Banks, Alan Hollinghurst, A. L. Kennedy, Will Self, Jeanette Winterson. Monica Ali, Sarah Waters, Nicola Barker, David Mitchell, Hari Kunzru, Zadie Smith. These major British Novelists were all included in past Best of Young British Novelists issues of Granta. Each issue is a unique anthology, a snapshot of the taste of a particular time, a statement about what constitutes quality in the novel, and a portrait of some of our best writers in the English language at the beginning of their careers. Thanks to our event for The Best of Young British Novelists 4, we have a limited number of Best of Young British Novelists 1, 2, and 3. You could think of these as collectors items, a full set would look very nice on a shelf indeed, but they're also a really cool reading experience, a chance to look back in time and see what some of our favorite authors were writing, ten, twenty, and thirty years ago.

How Plants Work: A Supreme Court Reading List

Let's review how plants work: Seeds go in the ground. They sprout. They grow into plants. The plants develop more seeds, all by themselves. And then the process starts again.

Step one: seeds. A Seed is Sleepy, by Dianna Hutts Aston.

Except when it doesn't. On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled [PDF] that patent infringement occurred when a farmer bought and planted seeds from a genetically modified strain of soybeans.

Step two: growth. From Seed to Plant, by Gail Gibbons.

The problem? The seeds contained a modification patented by Monsanto. And the farmer didn't buy his seed from Monsanto.

Like any family, there are parents and children. Vegetables: A Biography, by Evelyne Bloch-Dano.

Instead, he bought seeds that had been made the natural way, developing inside other plants grown from Monsanto seed.

Desire, in their own way. Because plants reproduce sexually, just like us. The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan.

But because these modified seeds were sold without Monsanto's approval, this particular agricultural transaction was a case of patent infringement.

If they could punish the plants for infringing, they probably would. Wicked Plants, by Amy Stewart.

To recap: Some soybeans reproduced, as they are wont to do. And the Supreme Court did not approve.

To read someone who gets plant reproduction, click here. The Trees in My Forest, by Bernd Heinrich.

$84,000 worth of disapproval, in this case.

Also pretty competent on the subject. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver.

At least they didn't actually fine the plants. That's one part of this that makes sense.

Someone else who makes sense. Home Economics, Wendell Berry.

For the rest of us -- those who think it doesn't make sense, or just want to brush up on our own awareness of plant biology -- here's a reading list.

Interview with Peter Mendelsund

We spend a lot of time looking at book covers here and fancy ourselves connoisseurs. A few months ago we started a Pinterest board of some of our favorite covers and one particular designer kept popping up. Peter Mendelsund. Peter Mendelsund is the Associate Art Director of Alfred A. Knopf Books, the Art Director of Pantheon Books, Art Director of Vertical Press, and a recovering classical pianist. His designs for Stieg Larsson’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy were described by The Wall Street Journal as being “the most instantly recognizable and iconic book covers in contemporary fiction.” His writing on literature, design and other matters can be found on his blog: jacketmechanical.blogspot.com. His first book, Cover, comes out Spring 2014. Below is an email interview with Peter.

How would you describe your job as a cover designer?

I am paid to read great books and interpret them. I have the greatest job in the world.

Do you feel any particular responsibilities to the book, author, and/or publishers?

My job as book designer and art director is predicated on the idea that I will help sell a book, and to the extent that I do that, successfully position a book in the marketplace by making the appropriate jacket for it, I am fulfilling my responsibilities to the publisher.

In terms of my responsibility to the author and the book…representing the text is not (at least not patently) something I’m paid to do, but I see this act as a moral imperative. Characterizing, explicating, interpreting a text visually is the most interesting and gratifying aspect of what I do. When I fail at this task of signifying what a book is (or I am urged or directed in some way to betray what I see as a book’s essential nature) there’s a palpable sense of loss and guilt. It feels important to me that a book’s cover should not be dissonant with, or oblivious to, the text within. A book cover should be a book’s true face; which is to say, optimally, a jacket or cover will be a kind of visual translation of the book in question. So—to the extent that I successfully describe or epitomize a book—its plot, its themes, its affect…I am fulfilling my responsibilities to the book and to its author.

What makes for a successful cover design?

A good cover should sell a book, and adequately represent what it is. It should work to entice a browser, and serve as a lasting emblem of the experience of having read a given text. There’s no formula for how to accomplish this. Which is to say that every good book cover is as unique as the text it is wrapping. But there are certain general rules of thumb I think a designer could cleave to: a good book cover should be pretty, or visually stimulating in some way— and it should look different from every other book cover around it. I count originality highest of all cover-design virtues.

What makes for an unsuccessful cover design?

I can’t stand covers which imitate other covers, or which slavishly look like whatever their designated genre is supposed to look like. I really dislike any cover that is a cliché, or that consists of clichés. There are visual clichés, tropes for every genre we publish—crime, chick lit, horror, history, science… even (or even especially) literary fiction…

A new book needs first and foremost to catch a browser’s eye, and, in order to do so, the cover has to stand out in some way. (Things stand out, tautologically, by looking distinctive, different from what's amassed around them). I can’t stress this point enough. There are so many books published every year, and so many of their covers look alike. Don’t they?
 
This is, of course, a product of a kind of insularity in the publishing business, the ways in which publishing is an echo chamber. But it’s also a product of a marketing culture that can exist anywhere, which can think of no better methodology than imitation. There is a fundamental fear that underlies many of the decisions made around book jackets; in this market, publishers want covers they think are safe bets—ie covers that are similar to other covers that have worked in the past. Unfortunately, by dictating that designers produce genre-ready, hackneyed, copycat covers, publishers are insuring just the opposite of their intent: they are insuring that a book will get lost amid the clones (or at the very least they are insuring that the jacket won’t be helping to make the sale).

I prefer ugly covers to clone covers. At least ugly covers demand a certain amount of attention.

What is your design process?

I get the manuscript from the editor or author—and I read it. (Sometimes twice.)

That’s the lion’s share of the work. Something tends to happen to me during the reading process—a visual idea will occur; something that can visually epitomize the entire text…

…then I sketch the idea quickly on paper…

…and then comes the process of actualizing that sketch. When I’m at the office I play with typography and color, and shape, maybe I experiment with photography or I’ll draw something, or collage something…sometimes it’s all done on the computer, sometimes all on paper...the construction stage of this process is very unscripted. I’ll just continue to make things until the idea is realized as well as it can be.

Besides other book covers, what influences your design?

Anything is a potential catalyst for a cover idea; the stimulus can come from anywhere. But one has to be on the lookout. I don’t think inspiration is something you passively receive. I’m always looking—everywhere. And there are certain kinds of visual acts which I’m always hoping to stumble upon. Unusual juxtapositions, surprising color combinations, new modes of visual expression…I am always interested by anything graphical that strikes me as (this is difficult to put into words) excitingly wrong. There is a cool-factor to certain images that lie just on this side of disagreeable…pictorial effects that make me think “this will bother a lot of unimaginative people.” Whenever I see something like that, a piece of art or graphic design that has that special kind of wrongness about it, I think “I need to do something like this myself.” Attendant to this is always the feeling of “in the future, this will be done a lot.” In other words, today’s ugly is tomorrow’s beautiful. The cover I made for Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed came out of this impulse. It’s ugly, but hopefully it’s interesting, and arresting. Hopefully!

Do you draw from art, advertising, pop culture? Is there anything you try to block out when working on a cover?

I definitely try to stay attuned to the fine arts world, though I don’t have a lot of time to see exhibitions. I’m not as plugged into the popular culture as I could be. (The positive side of this is that I can’t be accused of doing anything trendy.) The only things I consciously block out are ideas or images I’d deem stale or commonplace.


Is there a difference between designing a cover for a new book and re-designing a cover for a classic, like the covers you’ve done for Kafka, Joyce and Foucault? (All of which are fantastic I think.)

Thank you! Those were definitely some of the most rewarding projects I’ve worked on recently. Both projects were really self-generated, and neither, believe it or not, were subjected to any editorial or marketing interference whatsoever!

Some of my bedside reading material

The most obvious difference is that, in the first case you mentioned, when I’m working on a new book, there is a living author who can influence my thinking, either through direct or indirect intervention; who can improve, or impair my work.

(By the way, I’ve noticed that dead authors get the best book jackets. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why this is…)

The benefit of working on a newly written text is that one comes to a new work tabula rasa, without preconception or bias—there’s no critical history to contend with. With a classic, there’s all this cultural, critical, literary baggage that has to be accommodated. I’ve been working on re-packaging Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, and it is hard to do so without referencing all this critical thinking which, frankly, I’m not sure is relevant to my task—like Gramsci and Spivak and Said and the subaltern and feminist theory, postcolonial theory…it’s exhausting. Just to read the story and present it, without drowning under all these glosses is…difficult. But in some cases it is also hugely rewarding. For each of these

The first edition. From a visit to the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Collection

backlist projects I do a huge amount of re-reading—especially in the case of Joyce—of the primary and secondary texts, biographies; I visit rare book collections and libraries in order to view first editions and other extant editions… my series covers come out of that immersion.



Could you describe how you created or the thinking behind a couple of my favorite covers; The Enchanted Wanderer & The Flame Alphabet?

It’s funny, these are, of all my recent jackets, the most purely decorative—they describe almost nothing about the particulars of the book (plot, character…) but I’d say they both seek to convey something about the prose, the language itself, and the feeling of reading these (idiosyncratic) writers. Leskov’s prose are so strange, digressive, arrhythmic, odd at the sentence level, but even at the word level (there are these crazy portmanteau words in his stories, almost Joycean or Lewis Carroll-esque inventions; I frankly have no idea how Pevear and Volokhonsky translated some of these stories.) One wants to say that Leskov’s stories seem very modern, and they are modern in many ways; but there is a kind of engaging primitivism about them as well—he seems to be imitating a Russian folk demotic, but the effect is very, very new.

Also, Leskov has no compunction about introducing characters and then forgetting about them; creating a narrative thread and then unceremoniously dropping it…. None of the rules of classic narrative apply here. The stories are these shaggy dog constructions—I guess that’s where the jacket finds its starting point. The jacket, the arrow on the jacket, describes the strange, meandering form the stories take.

Ben’s work is also refreshingly, startlingly unconventional. In the case of The Flame Alphabet, I was struck with a single metaphor in the book (birds) and was taken with the idea of making the book feathered. So I made a bunch of feathers for a jacket. But it didn’t look right. So I turned the jacket

upside down…flames! A similar thing happened with the jacket for Ben’s forthcoming book of stories, Leaving the Sea. I started making fish scales for the cover, and ended up with an ocean. For all one’s planning, sometimes these things just happen serendipitously. 

What are some of your favorite covers by other designers and why?
 

Current fav is David Pearson’s cover for 1984 by George Orwell. I love it. This cover tells you everything important about Orwell’s book (by using the book itself as a device—David did the same thing when he designed the cover for Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction for Penguin Ideas) without telling you anything specific about the book’s plot. It is incredibly satisfying. Especially satisfying when a design like this escapes the marketing, er, censors, who I could imagine saying about this design that it is hard to read. But this is a cover that assumes, and rewards, a reader’s intelligence. It doesn’t talk down.

It seems like it would be satisfying in a tactile way as well, with the foil and the deboss, though I’ve never actually held it in the flesh (David—send me one.)

Too often self-published books or books from publishers without much of a design budget are really hindered by their covers. What advice would you give to self-published authors, small presses, or any other amateurs who find themselves in need of a book cover? Are there some principles that will help them create good covers no matter what resources they have? Or, are book covers just one of those things you really should leave to the professionals?

The best principle to keep in mind is: keep it simple. Most self-published book covers fail because they are trying too hard. Even design professionals fall into the trap of trying to shoe-horn too much design into one composition. I often tell students “your problem isn’t that you have poor ideas, it’s that you’ve got five ideas competing on the same page at the same time.” Simplify. If in doubt, stick with typography. Make sure the typography is legible. Use your handwriting if your handwriting is decent. If not, use a font. Any tried-and-true standard face will do (Bodoni, Baskerville, Garamond, Helvetica, Trade Gothic …) Pick a pretty color for your background. Viola. When you start to incorporate illustration, photography, etc. the amateurishness of the work begins to show. But there’s no need for any of that stuff. Many of the best book covers are as simple as could be.

There’s really no obvious reason why anyone can’t make a decent book cover—the skills required are easy to master. The tricky bits all have to do with taste and reading ability. Those parts may be a little bit harder to learn though.

Finally, what are you reading, besides what you might be working on?

A Heart So White, by Javier Marías; The Bathroom, by Jean-Philippe Toussaint; and Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.

See all of Peter’s work here,  here, or here. 

A Bookseller, The Day After

[This post was written on April 16, 2013, and originally ran on Book Riot.]

At 3:00 yesterday I had Twitter up and refreshing on the cash register screen, because Pulitzer.org just was not updating fast enough for this impatient bookseller. I was scanning through the updates, alt-tabbing between the browser and the inventory while reading out the winners’ names — until suddenly there were two stories. Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and there were explosions near the marathon finish line.

Patriots’ Day is a state holiday here in Massachusetts, and area schools are on vacation all week. The bookstore where I work, just across the river from Boston, was packed yesterday afternoon with parents and children who wanted to get out of the house on a gorgeous day. By 3:10 I wanted to chase them all away. Why did they all want to ask questions or check out when I was trying to grab every crumb of breaking news, not to mention find out about the Pulitzers I actually cared about? (The fiction winner sells, but the nonfiction/history/biography winners are usually more to my taste.)

I am so grateful to those customers. I didn’t need to track every permutation of the early casualty counts, the was-it-or-wasn’t-it JFK Library questions, the photos everyone seemed to be retweeting. My job is to point people to the stacks of Lean In, to confirm that the man in search of “Gonzo Girl” actually wanted Gillian Flynn’s book, to help the woman who called to order a birthday present for her six-year-old grandson who loved elephants. So that’s what I did.

The news was still there, in spare moments. Customers who had heard something in passing stopped by the desk to ask for news, and we did our best to fill them in. Some wanted to talk. One regular customer, who isn’t usually given to chatting, stopped by the desks for a few minutes. She said she was staying at the bookstore for now, where it felt safe.

By early evening the store started to clear out, as the families who had spent the afternoon there headed home for dinner. What followed was one of the quietest nights I can remember. I expect that once people made it home last night, they didn’t want to go out again. I don’t blame them.

We did have some customers, though, and one stands out, because she bought Oliver Jeffers’ The Heart and the Bottle. It’s a gorgeous picture book we cross-shelve in our collection of children’s books on grief and loss. It’s about fear, too, and how you can’t feel love without also being open to emotional pain — one of those great books that connects with both child and adult readers.

The book is a few years old now, but I only discovered it this winter, when a coworker handed it to me off the top of a pile of books we were putting away. By the time the book made it to the shelf, all the booksellers had read it. Someone pointed out that it was just the kind of thing parents had been looking for after the school shooting in Newtown.

I don’t think anyone expected that only a few months later parents would have another reason to come looking for it.

I wasn’t there on Boylston Street yesterday; I was only watching from a few miles away. But thousands of people were there, and thousands more are connected to the event. Boston is a small place, in the very best way — places that look miles apart on a map are only a short walk away. That’s one of the things I love about it. But it’s also the reason that the customer who bought The Heart and the Bottle yesterday won’t be the only one looking for a book to help a child work through what happened, or to understand it herself.
Whatever book those customers are looking for, I’ll be there to help them find it. That’s why I’m a bookseller.

Two Poetry Anthologies for National Poetry Month

Anthologies are great resources when you’re stuck in a reading funk. They allow you to explore, wander, and discover without having to commit to a full book by a single author(or several full books by several authors). Though my college professors might shudder at the analogy, anthologies can be the book equivalent of speed dating. So for National Poetry Month, here are two relatively new poetry anthologies, to break you out of your reading funk; let you wander and make discoveries in the world of contemporary poetry; and introduce you to dozens of different authors.

Postmodern American Poetry: An Anthology: “Postmodern” is one of those terms that, through misuse and overuse has become essentially meaningless (As clever as it is, Moe from The Simpsons isn’t quite right when he describes it as “weird for the sake of weird,” but he’s not totally wrong either.) To me, it’s pretty simple; postmodernism is the literature that happens after and continues the humanist exploration of modernism, playing with not just what stories we tell, or what stories are worthy of literature, but how we tell stories. (And yes, sometimes those continuations end up as pretty weird books.) Collecting the legendary and the obscure, including some of my favorites like G.C. Waldrep, Charles Bernstein and Noah Eli Gordon, extracts from massive poems and tiny little grenades of verse, as well as essays on poetics and biographic sketches of the poets this anthology demonstrates the diversity of American poetry boiling just beneath the main stream.

The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral: Nature poetry has always been important to American literature. Quite often it is the only style or subject matter a lot of people are really aware of. As a nation of the frontier, whose core myths are based in the idea of carving civilization out of the virgin wild, our relationship to nature is central to our relationship with American culture. But nature is a lot stranger than we give it credit for. Evolution has allowed for a dizzying array of perplexing, amusing, and disturbing plants and animals. Furthermore, as society grew, our relationship to nature changed. Climate change and environmental activism. Genetic engineering and national parks. Ecotourism and localism. There was a time when “Nature in America,” could be captured in direct poems built on clear images, but now, “nature,” is just as weird as everything else in our society. The Arcadia Project captures that weirdness, demonstrating a range of pastoral poetry as interesting, diverse, and weird, as nature itself.

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself that you don’t actually like poetry. If so, there’s a chance you’ll find a lot to like in these anthologies. Specifically selected to showcase a wide range of styles, formats, and tastes beyond the mainstream, these anthologies show the true range of poetry as a mode of expression and could very well include reading experiences you’ve never associated with poetry. There’s more to modern poetry than Billy Collins and more to nature poetry than Mary Oliver.

Kobo Mini & Snapback Sale

Just in time for mother’s day, graduation, and/or vacation, Kobo is running a sale on their Mini. From April 5th to April 18th, Kobo Minis will be $59.99 and you’ll get a free Mini Snapback with your purchase, while supplies last. This pocket sized e-ink reader is Gary’s device of choice. High resolution, long battery life, W-Fi enabled, and enough memory for 1,000 books, the Mini makes a great gift and a great travel companion.

Bookseller Taste Exchange: Rebecca & Barb (Part 1)

We (Rebecca and Barb) were so inspired by Josh and Sarah's grand book recommendation experiment a few weeks ago that we decided to do one of our own!

Barb Suggests: The Body Farm by Patricia Cornwell. 5th in the Kay Scarpetta crime fiction novels, this was the first one that I read.  After reading this, I had to read the others in the series, as well.  Kay, the protagonist, is the Chief Medical Examiner of the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is a strong, smart, beautiful woman.  You get to know her well as she takes you on a journey through the investigation of an 11 year old girl in rural North Carolina.  The murder has the same handiwork of a wanted serial killer.  The investigation brings us to a clandestine research facility, the body farm, where cadavers are experimented on to determine different stages of decay and decomposition.  The forensics are what I found so compelling.  The twists and turns make the book a page turner! There is a wonderful cast of characters, including her niece, who works at the FBI bureau in Quantico and assists Scarpetta in the research on this case.  Wesley, her co-worker, romantic interest and her gruff partner, Marino, also working on the case. The Body Farm is an easy to read, fast paced novel full of believable forensic activity.

Rebecca Suggests: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I was about to suggest The Miseducation of Cameron Post (emily m. danforth) (also a great book, go read it). But then I learned that not only had Barb never read anything by Neil Gaiman, she'd never even heard of Neil Gaiman! What a travesty, as I'm sure you'll all agree. This being the case, I immediately shoved The Graveyard Book into Barb's hands. The Graveyard Book is a deliciously creepy reimagining of The Jungle Book in which the requisite orphan boy, Bod, is being raised by a graveyard full of ghosts. Featuring Gaiman's signature weirdness, not to mention his lovely prose, The Graveyard Book is not your typical middle grade read. Perfect for readers who enjoy being (just a little) scared at the hands of a master storyteller.

Check back to see what we thought of each other's recommendations!