In this stunning debut short story collection, Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and occasionally surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories—which range from poignant, to darkly funny, to unsettling—will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife’s funeral is a success. Time and again, Jones’s characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, innocence, life as they know it. The stories gathered in this collection are arresting, original, and beautifully rendered. The Goodbye Process packs a punch, just the way grief does—knocking us off our feet.

Here is the cover, designed by Anna Morrison.

Author Mary Jones: “I was hoping the cover would be minimalistic and beautiful, with a hint of quirkiness. I think this cover perfectly embodies those things, and more. I love the clean design, and the color palette which feels both sophisticated and playful. I like that the cover image is not explicit, but is open for interpretation, and everyone I’ve shown it to has had something different to say about it. To me it suggests that a conversation is happening, and maybe one person—the person with the colder cup—has been talking for a while, opening up. In all of the stories in the collection characters are at various stages of letting go of things—relationships, health, life as they know it. I feel like with this colder cup, and with the upward spiraling steam, Anna captures the feeling here that something is being released, let go of.”

Designer Anna Morrison: “Working on a collection of short stories can sometimes be a challenge, especially when trying to encapsulate a feeling that encompasses a range of different narratives. However, Mary Jones’s collection, The Goodbye Process, has a strong, overarching theme of loss and grief, with some humor intertwined in the writing. I also wanted to convey a sense of intimacy on the cover but with an unspoken loneliness, too. There are a lot of different perspectives in this collection, but I felt like the steaming cups of coffee could be the background to many difficult (or happy) conversations.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “The Goodbye Process” by Mary Jones appeared first on Electric Literature.

Fady Joudah’s powerful sixth collection of poems opens with, “I am unfinished business,” articulating the ongoing pathos of the Palestinian people. A rendering of Joudah’s survivance, […] speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure and insists on presence inside and outside the ancestral land. Responding to the unspeakable in real time, Joudah offers multiple ways of seeing the world through a Palestinian lens—a world filled with ordinary desires, no matter how grand or tragic the details may be—and asks their reader to be changed by them. The sequences are meditations on a carousel: the past returns as the future is foretold. But “Repetition won’t guarantee wisdom,” Joudah writes, demanding that we resuscitate language “before [our] wisdom is an echo.” These poems of urgency and care sing powerfully through a combination of intimate clarity and great dilations of scale, sending the reader on heartrending spins through echelons of time. […] is a wonder. Joudah reminds us “Wonder belongs to all.”

Here is the cover, designed by Mary Austin Speaker.

Author Fady Joudah: “I wrote the bulk of this collection between October and Decemeber of 2023. I could not imagine a title for the book or for most of its poems in a time of extermination. The text of the poems already says enough. The text also betrays a necessary silence. And yet the silence in the book is the silence that the reader, listener, recipient should practice. In some moments I share this silence with them, and they with me. In many moments, however, the silence is solely their task. The ellipsis in brackets highlight the space in which a Palestinian speaks and others listen. The cover speaks to this silence as well as the survivance of Palestinians.”

Designer Mary Austin Speaker: “I worked closely with Fady on all aspects of […], and as we considered several busier cover designs, we began to see that this book required a minimalist cover in order for the pictographic title to be the focal point. This book is very much about silence— the majority of the poems in the book are titled, simply, “[…],” and we wanted a cover that offered that silence in a very direct, highly visible way.

I designed the package to carry the colors of the Palestinian flag when it’s viewed in full, and added a cloth texture not only to summon the flag but also to signify the interweaving of lives the book illustrates: what appears to be separate is actually woven of the same cloth. The front cover uses only green and black, while the back cover is a red field featuring a single poem. It was Fady’s idea to bisect the cover with two colors, which I agreed lent itself to the very idea of division that this book seeks to subvert with complexity, trouble, history, names, art—all the things that get subsumed by silence—represented here by the ellipsis in brackets as well as Fady’s name in both English and Arabic. The black field offers a space for grief, while the green field below represents land that remains alive despite besiegement. We made the decision to represent Fady’s name in both the English and Arabic letterforms in order not only to render Fady’s presence as Arab and as Palestinian American immediately legible to an American audience, but also to push the boundaries of book cover conventions—Arabic script is beautiful and illustrative, but of what? Printing the author’s name in Arabic invites us to try harder to overcome our gaps in understanding. It’s a start.”

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“A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.”

So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Here is the cover, art by Anja Niemi.

Editor Cian McCourt: “We used the Norwegian neo-romantic painter Harald Sohlberg for the cover for Will and Testament, which did a grand job representing the gravitas of that novel (and the painting helpfully featured a cabin). But with the next Hjorth novel we published, Long Live the Post Horn!, I wanted something that captured the very contemporary, very relatable angst in her fiction, as well as hinting at the humour in her writing, which often goes unremarked on. I’d loved Anja Niemi’s work for a long while, and when the penny dropped that she was Norwegian (and a fan of Vigdis, as it turns out), she was the clear choice.  And I’m delighted we can return to her for If Only. This new cover gets right at the heart of how a love affair, when played out in its most ardent, obsessive key, can unmoor you from your sense of self. I think it speaks to the awful ambivalence true passion begets.”

Author Vigdis Hjorth: “I like it immediately. I like it intensely. I like that it’s so red. I like that it is not naturalistic, that it is artificial. I like that the woman’s face is realistic in its expression, the horror at the sight of what may be her own future self.”

The design team: “We were thrilled to be able to feature the stunning work of Norwegian artist Anja Niemi on the cover. Like Hjorth’s brilliant novel, Niemi’s ‘The Socialite’ implores the viewer to investigate her relationship—not to her self—but to her selves.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “If Only” by Vigdis Hjorth appeared first on Electric Literature.

When Bernie answers Leah’s ad for a new housemate in Philadelphia, the two find themselves caught in an intense and unique friendship—for which art and artmaking are cornerstones. Bernie, a photographer, and Leah, a writer, share a drive to capture the world around them. 

When Bernie’s former photography professor—the renowned, yet drenched in scandal Daniel Dunn, dies—leaving her an inheritance, Leah accompanies Bernie on the road trip through America’s heartland, rural Pennsylvania, where they attempt to document the country through words and photographs. 

As Bernie and Leah chase everything—their own ideas, dreams, and answers to their questions—they come into contact and conversation with people from every corner of life. Along the way, they begin to reach for the limits of their capabilities, both romantically and artistically.

From the acclaimed author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, comes a debut novel of warmth, insight, and heart, a glorious celebration of queer life, and the redemptive force of love and art.

Here is the cover, designed by Lynn Buckley.

“As a queer designer, it was so exciting to work with a queer author dedicated to an authentic portrayal of queer life,” says Buckley. “I enjoyed making something that felt true to my experiences, and those of the characters in Housemates.”

Eisenberg agrees, noting that the cover feels like a love letter celebrating queerness, artmaking, and the book’s West Philadelphia setting. “I was hoping for a cover that conjured a feeling of being both close and far at the same time, home and away at the same time, together and alone at the same time, and this cover simply NAILS that twoness. The novel is about falling in romantic love and art love with your housemate (queer chaos!), about figuring out how to relate to the artists that came before you, and how to live in hyper close proximity to other people, so I love the way that the bright colors and graphic shape suggest the openness of the road while the blue houses suggest the joyful claustrophobia of the Philly neighborhood where the book is set.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Emma Copley Eisenberg’s “Housemates” appeared first on Electric Literature.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.  

“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,” KB Brookins writes. “Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says ‘female,’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you’re something else entirely?” 

Informed by Brookins’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as “other.”

Here is the cover, designed by Chip Kidd, artwork by Anita Kunz.

Author KB Brookins: “This book is unlike any other project I’ve attempted, so I wanted to make a necessary departure from my first two books’ covers (How To Identify Yourself With a Wound and Freedom House). When developing cover ideas, I thought to myself ‘how has birthing this book felt?’, and I kept thinking about breath, stillness, and balance—all things required to get to emotional clarity and own/reflect on the past. I also thought about how nerve-wracking it is to not hide behind a ‘character’ that isn’t me, and how sweaty I get when out in the Texas sun. Yellow as a background kept calling to me. I also thought about this book being my most vulnerable thing, and thought there was nothing more vulnerable to me than having a version of myself—with my skin showing—on the cover. So I took some pictures and sent those (along with summations of three ideas) to Chip and Anita, who knocked it out of the park. After some necessary input from Erroll McDonald (my editor), the idea that stuck is the one that felt most true and in alignment with the feeling that I hope the book evokes in readers—calm that has come from a Black, trans, beautifully chaotic lifetime of searching for peace. I feel so honored to have this brave book coming into the world with Knopf, and hope that readers feel as moved by the book’s design and words as I do.” 

Designer Chip Kidd: “The author basically art-directed this cover, which really helped. Once I read KB’s brief on what they were looking for, Anita instantly came to mind. Her lovely sensibility and skill was perfect for this astonishing, brave book. I just stayed out of her way and let her do the magic.”

Painter Anita Kunz: “I love painting portraits of extraordinary people and I was thrilled when Chip Kidd gave me this assignment. I read nothing but great reviews about KB Brookins and really feel that they are doing meaningful and important work. My main aim was to paint them in a beautiful and sensitive way, but I also wanted to add a tiny element of magic, so I added the tattoo bird which appears to come to life.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Pretty” by KB Brookins appeared first on Electric Literature.

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner’s son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.

Jacob “Jake” Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake’s right-hand man.

By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone—high-wire prose and ripped-from-the-headlines social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

Here is the cover, designed by David Litman.

Author Cally Fiedorek: I was a big fan of David Litman’s design before ever thinking he would agree to work on my cover. I had a little “mood board” going, which was fun to assemble; there were a few comps of David’s own recent work, including the cover for Sam Lipsyte’s latest book, plus the cover of a Weegee photo book, Naked City, that I liked. I wanted something pointedly urban, with some big-city glamour to it, but not too on-the-nose—neither self-consciously gritty, nor too cute. Especially with a motif as iconic as the New York City taxicab, there are many opportunities for cheesiness. 

David sent me three options, all of which I loved, but in the end I went with the most straightforward of the three. It just felt the most assured and most itself, somehow. I love how unfussy it is. If “unfussy” sounds like faint praise, it is not! The instinct to overdo it is so strong, especially for me, in my writing, and it feels like such a win when you bombard someone with twenty-five references and ideas, and they somehow manage to distill them into something natural, simple, and convincing. Thank you, David! 

Designer David Litman: Cally had some great suggestions at the outset that were very helpful. Atta Boy has dual perspectives, as it is both a New York crime story as well as a coming-of-age story, so we wanted to toe the line between gritty noir and youthful or playful. I designed a type treatment that felt mid-century noir but not too on-the-nose. Torn newspaper alludes to the periodicals that occur at intervals throughout the book. The imagery and color scheme hints a central element of the plot: the taxicab industry.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Cally Fiedorek’s “Atta Boy” appeared first on Electric Literature.

A year in the life of the unforgettable Catalina Ituralde, a wickedly wry and heartbreakingly vulnerable student at an elite college, forced to navigate an opaque past, an uncertain future, tragedies on two continents, and the tantalizing possibilities of love and freedom.

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfilment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: she is both fascinated and repulsed. Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved? 

Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read—and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.

Here is the cover, designed by Grace Han.

Author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: “I love this cover because it feels timeless and serious and that pairs nicely with the novel which makes a point to be unserious. It also reminds me of the design of old F. Scott Fitzgerald book covers which is terrific because I love him and hope to replace him soon.

The eye represents looking and being looked at, looking at yourself being looked at, the gaze, the tension between being an object and being a subject, desire and longing. Many of the non-fiction pieces I’ve written in the past few years have been accompanied by an unrelated picture of a sad, young brown child with large dark eyes just looking sad. It’s a different child each time and I never know who they are, that’s just the art that accompanies my essays. So I thought, what if the little brown girl in the corner of all the photos of war and such, what if she grew up to write a book that showed she was looking the entire time? Looking, and remembering everything. Remembering names.”

Designer Grace Han: “I was ecstatic to be given the opportunity to create a visual introduction to Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s work. As a child of immigrants, I saw myself in Catalina—in her desperation to distance herself from family and in her desire for self discovery. I wanted the cover to give us a sense of hope in addition to giving us an intimate peek into Catalina’s life as she attempts to find her place in between worlds. I hope this cover captures the poignancy and profoundness of Catalina.“

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s “Catalina” appeared first on Electric Literature.

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and science for literal interpretations of the bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, “it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34^th Street.”

What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” the presence of PFAs in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.

Here is the cover, designed by Sarah Schulte, art by Jack Spencer.

Sarah Schulte: “Loose of Earth conjures strong images and conflicting themes—desolation, vastness, but beauty, too. Kathleen’s landscapes are equally gorgeous and gritty, and there’s an interesting tension at the core of the story between love, loss, faith, grief, and revisitation that matches the complexities of the place in which that story unfolds. 

Capturing this powerful sense of place became a goal for the cover early on, and the challenge was to figure out the best way to evoke this landscape. Initially, I explored a range of illustration directions, but something was missing. While the results hinted at the innocence and wonder within the memoir, they did not fully convey the more painful emotions of loss and grief felt throughout the book. We turned to the portfolio of fine art photographer Jack Spencer, who has travelled Texas and photographed much of its majesty. We came across the image of the road that is now on the cover, and it was perfect. The photo had it all: the emptiness, the grit, the beauty, and a unique kind of depth that simultaneously seems to suspend time, while also bridging the past to the present.”

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn: “Most artists tend to focus on the vast West Texas sky, but Jack Spencer’s photograph gives equal attention to the land, and I love how Sarah Schulte engaged with the surrealism. When I saw her design for the first time, it felt like an encounter with a memory or an image from a dream. This road, are we returning to it or about to begin? The plains in West Texas are among the flattest in the U.S., but where is the steady ground? The place is destabilized, vibrating, unsettled. Words emerge in the longhand quality of Sarah’s script, taking their cues from the lines of the telephone poles and the horizon. The cover hit me between the ribs. It echoed back the story in new registers.” 

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Loose of Earth” by Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Ironbound is a large, multi-ethnic immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, filled with characters rich in pride, history, and culture—if not money. The vibrant stories in I’ll Give You A Reason, the debut short story collection by Annell López, are a love letter to this place, and its people. Concerned with questions of race, identity, connection, displacement and belonging, the characters who move through this collection are thoughtful, compelling, and unforgettable. Look for the grieving widow who finds herself bear hunting with a near stranger on her first date after her husband’s death, or the unhappy wife who reconsiders her mother’s rituals and love spells in comparison to her own lackluster romance. Then there’s the college student who discovers a porn star with the same name, and obsesses over the young woman for her freedom, and her comfort in her own skin. 

Annell López’s characters dive deep into the biggest stuff of life: religion, body image, sexuality, Blackness, gentrification, and they do so during times of great political unrest. 

Here is the cover, designed by Brooke Houghton, with art by Layqa Nuna Yawar.

López is especially proud of how the cover speaks to the many realities of living in Newark. “I wanted the cover of I’ll Give You A Reason to represent Newark and to speak to the themes of immigration, belonging, and hope found in the collection. I’ve been a fan of Layqa Nuna Yawar’s work for a long time. When I came across a New York Times piece highlighting Layqa’s murals at the newly revitalized Newark Airport, I knew I wanted him to create the artwork for my book. As an immigrant who once arrived in the United States through the Newark Airport, I felt personally connected to his work. Seeing the Black and brown faces on those murals made me feel seen.” 

López adds that she and Yawar actually met up in person—at a coffee shop in the Ironbound—to discuss his artwork, and her cover. “He asked me about the book, my growing up in Newark, and my immigration journey. He let me speak for long stretches of time while he—alternating between notes and sketches—jotted down ideas on his iPad. I talked at length about the book, the liminal spaces we inhabit as immigrants, the grief I feel, the baggage I still carry, and how Newark is so dear to my heart.”

Yawar is most proud of the authenticity this cover represents. “This cover comes from conversations and moments of overlapped lived immigrant experiences, specifically from people in and around Newark. To all the diaspora here, this art collaboration is for you.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Annell López’s “I’ll Give You A Reason” appeared first on Electric Literature.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Here is the cover, designed by Mary Austin Speaker, artwork by Devan Shimoyama.

We spoke to the designer and the poet about their thoughts on the cover:

Mary Austin Speaker: “The invitation to design one of Danez Smith’s books was a dream come true! I have admired their poems for such a long time and was thrilled to create a design for a work of literature that challenges its reader while foregrounding the vulnerability and power of its author at once. Danez offered some stunning artwork that I adored, but they graciously left the door open to what else I might find. When I lit upon the work of Devan Shimoyama I felt an immediate, thrilling kinship with Danez’s poetry: fire, you could say. Both artists depict a central figure consonant with the world around them, impacted by the world’s barbs as much as by its beauty. There is something a little byzantine to me about the figuring in Shimoyama’s work, but with the visual energy of Chris Ofili and the melancholy and color brilliance of Tessa Mars. The figure of the barbershop client felt spot on for Danez’s poems which are so deeply of a piece with their community and have everything to do with the delivery and receipt of care. I hope what readers encounter when they see this cover is a portrait of an artist full of love and sadness at once, alone-together, held and beheld.”

Danez Smith: “I was so elated to know Mary Austin Speaker was going to help find the cover for this book. As designer, curator, editor, I have always been so in love with the covers and titles Mary helps bring into the world so the thought of having a Mary Austin Speaker cover made me feel in good hands. Mary shared so many wonderful options, but Devan Shimoyama’s work was filled with such a mysterious, intense, and yet deeply familiar feeling that I found myself immediately pulled into his worlds and figures. I feel honored for these poems to come armored in this work, which for me speaks to the threads of love, care, community, and craftsmanship that are woven throughout the book. Those eyes, jewels crying ruby tears, are the kind of eyes I hope these poems see with. The color, too. This book is deeply blue, purple even, but that hopefully pink and that kind, beautiful hand taking care of that weeping figure? That’s what I hope readers come to by the end of these bluesy poems: a little window of hope, a helping hand.”

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