Summing up Vanessa Springora’s experience in a singular, all-encompassing graphic was a daunting task. Already an international literary sensation, Consent is an exposé on power, trauma and recovery. My personal design standards were higher than usual, and my canvas blank longer than usual.
The first directions I initially explored fell short. Butterflies - a nod to Nabokov - carried little emotional weight for this particular package.
News of uncontacted indigenous tribes being “discovered” fascinates me. Max Gross imagines life without awareness of the modern world in The Lost Shtetl, his incredible debut that hooked me at page one.
A small Jewish shtetl known as Kreskol exists deep in the Polish forest, so secluded it missed out on modern amenities and is even spared the horrors of the Holocaust. A string of events sends an unprepared villager into society, and Kreskol is unwittingly put on the map.
The cover art for Lost in the Spanish Quarter needed to somehow embody an entire literary event: it is the very first title published by HarperVia- the newest HarperCollins imprint focused on publishing amazing fiction in translation, and author Heddi Goodrich translated the novel herself from Italian to English. I geared up for action.
Goodrich’s writing is a full sensory ride. A visual cue that stood out to me as I read is the way she writes of Naples as a character: a living, breathing contributor to her story. Crumbling buildings and crowded streets showed up in very rough sketches early on, along with different lettering experiments to help drive home the experience of intimacy.
Mouthful of Birds was presented on my first list as a cover designer for Riverhead and stars aligned. With a six-month-old baby at home, I needed another reason to lose sleep at night.
Packaging Samanta Schweblin’s newest collection of short stories proved to be an all-consuming adventure like the stories themselves. I was immediately moved as I read- I’ve always been fascinated with tales that end with more questions than answers. The stories are short (some just two pages long) but packed full of evocative and haunting imagery- more than some full-length novels. Schweblin has mastered the formula for captivating storytelling and I quickly got caught up in the ride.
