A feast of groovy covers of new/imminent/upcoming books...
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| The front and back covers of a novel told from the point of view of a worker bee |
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| From a collection of stories about literary bad behaviour and poor dentistry. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
Love the office one :)
ReplyDeleteThe 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
ReplyDeleteWho publishes that version, Komal?
ReplyDeleteTake 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.
ReplyDeleteVery true: the UK one has a nice idea behind it, but the effect is more Grand Prix driver than explorer of other planets.
ReplyDeleteI felt much the same way about Fullblood Arabian, though perhaps I liked it slightly more than you did.
ReplyDeleteAs 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
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.
ReplyDelete