Wednesday 12 February 2014

Covers to Come

A feast of groovy covers of new/imminent/upcoming books...


Due in March: Black Moon is a very good and very unsettling novel set in a world where lethal insomnia is spreading like a plague; an owl mask worn by one of the survivors is the inspiration for this striking cover design.


Just out now, though apparently previously self-published, The Martian is about an astronaut stranded alone on Mars. This photographic cover is really beautiful, and surprisingly restrained for a SF novel these days.

The Intern's Handbook is about lethal shenanigans in the workplace; a very clever cover indeed.


Coming in July, Invisible Beasts is a beautiful semi-Borges-like fantastic and fictional menagerie. The cover uses bat illustrations from Ernst Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur. See the original page here, and all of the other amazing pages here.


The front and back covers of a novel told from the point of view of a worker bee


From a collection of stories about literary bad behaviour and poor dentistry.

A gorgeous cover for Fullblood Arabian, a disappointing book of prose poems: I found them facile and pseudo-profound (the nod to Khalil Gibran in Lydia Davis's introduction should have tipped me off), but plenty of people disagree with me.  


Speaking of disappointing, Shantytown is the latest translation for an author I always want to like a lot more than I do (Aira is famous for never revising after the day of writing is over, which is fine and dandy, but I reckon it means he'll never write a great book). He gets great cover treatments, though.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the office one :)

Komal said...

The Scatter Here is Too Great's cover is heinous. I'm glad I bought the South Asian edition: https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSv9KZOKx8WihLAR5JIKTrmTXEpv0dw0UdsChIN091k0wVVn4lR

JRSM said...

Who publishes that version, Komal?

thomas conneely said...

Take a look at how the US cover of The Martian is vastly better than the UK edition - Love the US cover. UK one , very Meh.

JRSM said...

Very true: the UK one has a nice idea behind it, but the effect is more Grand Prix driver than explorer of other planets.

Matt Keeley said...

I felt much the same way about Fullblood Arabian, though perhaps I liked it slightly more than you did.

As regards Gibran, I will never read him, but I'm glad that he inspired the funniest pan I have ever read:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/03/003-on-the-recent-publication-of-kahlil-gibrans-icollected-worksi

JRSM said...

That review is wonderful! Thanks for the link. I've long been a collector of Penguin Classics, but even so I never could bring myself to buy their edition of The Prophet.