![]() īy (quite literally) blurring a whole group of authors together with bright, often meaningless shapes, the major book publishers hope to maintain a financial consistency through an aesthetic one - playful but inoffensive, Instagram-baity though refined. Or perhaps you’ve noticed the more recent phenomenon of long and precious lyrical titles, in the vein of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Maybe you recall when every book was titled “The ’s Wife” or “The ’s Daughter,” another outcome of the publishing world trying to style new novels according to the blueprint of established bestsellers. Among these is Amazon’s recommendation engine, a mechanism that constantly equates products as interchangeable and therefore incentivizes a kind of uniformity. There are even larger industry forces beyond an artist’s control. You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat Catapult Notably, both books are from the Penguin Group’s Riverhead imprint, suggesting an in-house directive. Lauren Peters-Collaer, who gave Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half perhaps the seminal blobby book cover, has a portfolio bursting with diverse and impactful compositions, and only occasionally returns to the splotchy fields of color - as on the 2021 novel After the Sun, by Jonas Eika. But on other projects, she has turned to clever photography and vivid painterly detail. Nicole Caputo, creative director at Catapult Books, contributed to the abstract fashion with her cover for Zaina Arafat’s 2020 novel You Exist Too Much, imbuing the art with attractively shimmering gold stripes, and selected similarly vibrant, dancing flames for Shruti Swamy’s story collection of that same year, A House Is a Body. It’s not a case of one or two designers running amok. It’s important to say here that neither authors nor the artists themselves can be blamed for the trend. For all their potential verve, these geometries are a far cry from the emphatic expressionism that dominated 20th-century painting - they are tepid and hesitant, more like the palette itself than any arresting vision one might create with these saturated hues. As critics and influencers continue to point out, cover art has in recent years regressed to a sort of algorithmic average: the colorful, crowded blobs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that experience when browsing contemporary fiction today? To pick up a volume because it stands out as peculiar on its face? Too bad. ![]() I loved it, though, and not just for the arresting visual I also knew there was nothing like it in any bookstore I’d visited. ![]() I realized why my publishers had worded their message so gently: not every young author will be thrilled to see themselves removed from the prime real estate on their finished work. The front cover had become a striking, enigmatic image without context, one that invited curiosity and even a slight alarm. It also removed my name and the title of the novel, relegating those to the spine alone. The updated version that landed in my inbox kept the mask but changed the background to a violent red. We’d been going back and forth on a few concepts, including one design that featured a large respiratory mask seemingly strapped around the book itself - a reference to a fictional gaseous drug in the story. ![]()
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