How to Pronounce Knife is a wonderful and sharply written collection of stories about Laotian immigrants and refugees. They’re human and thoughtful stories about families and individuals who are determined to create a life. The characters are hard working, often doing manual labor as factory works, bus drivers, working on animal processing plants or nail salons.
Looking back on my design process for This is Not a Love Song, I realized that my thinking didn't start with the manuscript. It started with Brendan Mathew's first book, The World of Tomorrow, which I had had the great pleasure of reading and designing the cover for in 2016.
It's interesting to compare these two books because they're wildly different. The World of Tomorrow is a fantastically fun, fast paced novel set around the 1939 World's Fair. A very specific setting and time period, that had a clear visual vocabulary. This is Not a Love Song is a set of contemporary short stories that are much more meditative. As with most story collections, there are a wide range of settings and characters to dive into.
Lauren Harms is a book cover designer living in New York City. Having been highlighted before for her work on Invincible Summer and Where the Peacocks Sing, we catch up with her once again to talk about the process of her cover for Startup - the new must read by Doree Shafrir.
