Showing posts with label cover art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cover art. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Friday, November 01, 2013
Good enough to eat
Unseemly gloating, but - I just got the most amazing email from my editor at Columbia. This is going to be the cover for the style book! (Not yet available for pre-order, but it will be soon.) It is certainly the best book I have written to date, and I am pretty certain it is the best cover too....
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Lou Reed's autograph
It is a long time since I was wholly psychologically in thrall to Lou Reed, but for a number of years (from 17 to 21, maybe?) I think I listened to VU and LR more than pretty much anything else.
I remember hearing "Venus in Furs" on a mix tape playing on a battery-powered boombox that sat on the front seat of my friend Lee's big boat of an American car. It was so arrestingly lovely and like nothing I had ever heard before that I could not rest until I heard the whole album.
It is possible that The Velvet Underground (the book, not the album) was the first thing I ever requested via Interlibrary Loan as a first-year student at Harvard.
Lou Reed is known in recent years to have resembled a lizard. I have seen him at various new-music performances: he was a benevolent presence on the scene, with a much stronger interest in the music of young artists than many of his peers.
My obsession with Lou Reed was still running hot enough c. 1990 that when my then boyfriend (we were living in New York, in a studio apartment on 23rd St. down the street from the Chelsea Hotel) called me up, on a Friday afternoon when I'd gotten home from work a bit early, to say that Lou Reed was standing across the counter from him in the dingy 8th St. computer store he was employed by, I thought it was a joke. Once persuaded the sighting was for real, I raced over and saw the Great Man with my own eyes. I may still have, somewhere in a box, the crumpled credit card receipt, signed by Lou Reed, for a wholly unglamorous desktop computer. It slightly shattered my notion of the rock-star lifestyle that Lou Reed would buy a computer of that ilk in a store of that genus, but on the other hand he was known for his frugality in certain aspects of life.
This is one of the saddest and loveliest songs ever written.
I have probably listened to Berlin at least fifty times, maybe more.
Lou Reed's transsexual muse. (Via Larry LaF.)
There are many reasons I would never do karaoke, but one of them is that it's hard to imagine one of the options would be this, one of only a handful of songs I'd be willing to sing solo in public in a bar, no matter how much alcohol might have been consumed.
Finally, the Daily Mail misses the boat once again, in a recent piece about tattoos gone wrong. Their caption for the picture below: "One couple found a fruity - and permanent - way to show their love for one another." What it should say: classic Warhol banana from the cover of the best album every made!
I remember hearing "Venus in Furs" on a mix tape playing on a battery-powered boombox that sat on the front seat of my friend Lee's big boat of an American car. It was so arrestingly lovely and like nothing I had ever heard before that I could not rest until I heard the whole album.
It is possible that The Velvet Underground (the book, not the album) was the first thing I ever requested via Interlibrary Loan as a first-year student at Harvard.
Lou Reed is known in recent years to have resembled a lizard. I have seen him at various new-music performances: he was a benevolent presence on the scene, with a much stronger interest in the music of young artists than many of his peers.
My obsession with Lou Reed was still running hot enough c. 1990 that when my then boyfriend (we were living in New York, in a studio apartment on 23rd St. down the street from the Chelsea Hotel) called me up, on a Friday afternoon when I'd gotten home from work a bit early, to say that Lou Reed was standing across the counter from him in the dingy 8th St. computer store he was employed by, I thought it was a joke. Once persuaded the sighting was for real, I raced over and saw the Great Man with my own eyes. I may still have, somewhere in a box, the crumpled credit card receipt, signed by Lou Reed, for a wholly unglamorous desktop computer. It slightly shattered my notion of the rock-star lifestyle that Lou Reed would buy a computer of that ilk in a store of that genus, but on the other hand he was known for his frugality in certain aspects of life.
This is one of the saddest and loveliest songs ever written.
I have probably listened to Berlin at least fifty times, maybe more.
Lou Reed's transsexual muse. (Via Larry LaF.)
There are many reasons I would never do karaoke, but one of them is that it's hard to imagine one of the options would be this, one of only a handful of songs I'd be willing to sing solo in public in a bar, no matter how much alcohol might have been consumed.
Finally, the Daily Mail misses the boat once again, in a recent piece about tattoos gone wrong. Their caption for the picture below: "One couple found a fruity - and permanent - way to show their love for one another." What it should say: classic Warhol banana from the cover of the best album every made!
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Kafka's eyes
Notional box set of intense desirability! (Link courtesy of Ian C.-B.)
(The sole detail I don't like on this otherwise gorgeous page of designs is the placement of the author's name on the Amerika cover. I don't know why it jumps out at me, but it just doesn't seem right!)
(Is it box set or boxed set? I have always preferred the latter term, but neither one seems actually incorrect, though the first is perhaps a back-formation; on a related note, I really do strongly prefer course release to course relief as the term for getting a reduced course load in exchange for taking on some administrative responsibility, though neither phrase is exactly flattering when it comes to conceiving what it is that one does while teaching.)
(The sole detail I don't like on this otherwise gorgeous page of designs is the placement of the author's name on the Amerika cover. I don't know why it jumps out at me, but it just doesn't seem right!)
(Is it box set or boxed set? I have always preferred the latter term, but neither one seems actually incorrect, though the first is perhaps a back-formation; on a related note, I really do strongly prefer course release to course relief as the term for getting a reduced course load in exchange for taking on some administrative responsibility, though neither phrase is exactly flattering when it comes to conceiving what it is that one does while teaching.)
Friday, December 03, 2010
The diplomatic bag
Andy Martin does a hilariously good interview with Lee Child for The Independent, including a moniker origin-story that I'd never heard before:
(Given how few novel ideas there are out there about how to publicize good books, this seems to me an excellent one - give away an earlier installment in the series to hook new readers who will purchase or at least obtain all the others. I don't think the first installment in the series is as good as the later ones - I liked it very much when I read it, but it didn't exude that crack-like addictive aura that the few-volumes-later ones did, and I don't know that it would be the best choice for the give-away - but I see why this one was chosen out of recent installments. I think I would have picked Die Trying, personally; my favorite two are Persuader and The Enemy, but each is slightly anomalous in its way and probably wouldn't have been the best choice.)
(Apologies for the flash - I was too impatient to remind myself properly how to turn it off...)
Also: Jack Reacher recently made my list of the fifteen most memorable fictional characters that I could think of off the top of my head who had notionally influenced me (why, though, didn't I think of Sherlock Holmes?).
The origin of his name goes back to a mid-1970s train ride in the US. He and his wife fell into conversation with an American who told them that he owned a "European" car. It turned out to be a Renault 5, marketed in the US – to give it a certain Parisian chic – as "Le Car". But the friendly American said: "Lee Car". After that, "Lee" became their surrogate definite article: "Can you pass lee butter, please," and so on. When he and his wife had a baby, the kid was inevitably nicknamed "Lee Child". "I was looking for a name that was short, crisp and memorable," he says. Lee Child (Snr) was born.It is well known to regular readers in these parts that I think Lee Child is a genius of light reading; he is also a genius of (or at least signal innovator in) publicity, witness the recent Reacher Ambassador campaign! I was invited by Lee's longtime publicist Maggie Griffin to become a "Reacher Ambassador," and seized the opportunity; in my office at Columbia is a box full of copies of the book pictured below (one of those slightly-unsightly-in-its-handling-proportions elongated mass-market paperbacks), and if you see me in New York in coming months (I have a plane ticket from Cayman to JFK on January 5) you should ask me for one...
(Given how few novel ideas there are out there about how to publicize good books, this seems to me an excellent one - give away an earlier installment in the series to hook new readers who will purchase or at least obtain all the others. I don't think the first installment in the series is as good as the later ones - I liked it very much when I read it, but it didn't exude that crack-like addictive aura that the few-volumes-later ones did, and I don't know that it would be the best choice for the give-away - but I see why this one was chosen out of recent installments. I think I would have picked Die Trying, personally; my favorite two are Persuader and The Enemy, but each is slightly anomalous in its way and probably wouldn't have been the best choice.)
(Apologies for the flash - I was too impatient to remind myself properly how to turn it off...)Also: Jack Reacher recently made my list of the fifteen most memorable fictional characters that I could think of off the top of my head who had notionally influenced me (why, though, didn't I think of Sherlock Holmes?).
Monday, November 15, 2010
Books, covers
Colleen Mondor throws down the gauntlet! Her beef is with the cover of The Explosionist - here's the link to the underlying cover contest at Bookshelves of Doom, which challenges readers to produce new cover art for a handful of books (including mine) whose covers were too "generic and girly" for teenage boys to be seen reading them!
I don't have strong opinions on covers myself, having read some huge proportion of the total number of books consumed in my life in library bindings. But it is true, the covers for The Explosionist and Invisible Things haven't been what I initially imagined.
The mental picture I had before the first book was ever accepted for publication was something more like the amazing Prokhudin-Gorskii photographic archive (the pictures are from Russia c. 1900, but taken with an unusual and uncanny color process that makes them really like nothing else on earth - you get the feel of it with the one I've included here):
I like the misty colors on the cover of Piers Vitebsky's superb book The Reindeer People:
I guess that without really thinking about it (I am not a visual person) I imagined a cover built around something like the old photos of Edinburgh buildings and street scenes - something more like this - capturing the panoramic feel of the city, and its vertical range...
I don't have strong opinions on covers myself, having read some huge proportion of the total number of books consumed in my life in library bindings. But it is true, the covers for The Explosionist and Invisible Things haven't been what I initially imagined.
The mental picture I had before the first book was ever accepted for publication was something more like the amazing Prokhudin-Gorskii photographic archive (the pictures are from Russia c. 1900, but taken with an unusual and uncanny color process that makes them really like nothing else on earth - you get the feel of it with the one I've included here):
I like the misty colors on the cover of Piers Vitebsky's superb book The Reindeer People:
I guess that without really thinking about it (I am not a visual person) I imagined a cover built around something like the old photos of Edinburgh buildings and street scenes - something more like this - capturing the panoramic feel of the city, and its vertical range...
Monday, March 15, 2010
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Cover models
There is an Invisible Things page in the HarperCollins catalog! I have been looking every few days to see if there would be an image of the cover somewhere online, and now I can share it with you - I am laughing, don't say it, it is true that Sophie of this book looks nothing like Sophie on the cover of the last book (and probably her hair should be darker!), but it is a very nice cover, isn't it?
The book is available for pre-order at Amazon - official publication date is November 23 - but it was when it first went up some weeks ago at Amazon that I felt that it really was all happening - it is not quite so stunning as when I published my first novel, but there is still the glorious thought I have an ISBN!
The book is available for pre-order at Amazon - official publication date is November 23 - but it was when it first went up some weeks ago at Amazon that I felt that it really was all happening - it is not quite so stunning as when I published my first novel, but there is still the glorious thought I have an ISBN!
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Cosmic rays
Joshua Glenn on the supermen of Radium Age science fiction. The dust-jackets are astonishing...
(Via John Holbo.)
(Via John Holbo.)
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
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