Paperback Writers: Of Seals and Tigers

The paperback edition of Anthony Doerr's Memory Wall, which won The Story Prize a few months ago, is out. We're always pleased when the official seal for the winner of The Story Prize appears on the cover. This version includes an added bonus: the story that won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, "The Deep," which isn't included in the hardcover version.

The paperback edition of one of the other finalists for The Story Prize, Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not An Option, will be out in a few days. Personally, I miss the striking tiger/child's arm design* of the hardcover and don't really understand the multiple choice options the paperback presents. When in doubt, go with 'd.'

The paperback for the third finalist, Yiyun Li's Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, probably won't be out until September or so.

* Here's my theory: Since Rivecca's story collection came out last year, two tiger-themed books (The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua) hit the market and the best-seller list, causing Rivecca's publisher to back off from the Panthera tigris image. However, I think the actual tiger content in Death Is Not an Option stacks up pretty well against the competition.

Book Design: Love In Infant Monkeys Writ Small

Another short story collection this year that has a design that caught my eye is Lydia Millet's Love in Infant Monkeys, published by Softskull Press, which Laura Miller of Salon just named as one of her Best of 2009 fiction picks.

The image of the half-peeled banana against a black background is striking. But the most original detail is what's on the peel—an actual sticker with the book's title printed on it. Aside from the effort it must have taken to apply a sticker to each copy, I can't imagine a commercial publisher would allow a title to be that small on the front cover.

Love in Infant Monkeys collects ten stories that in one way or another concern a celebrity (e.g., Madonna, David Hasselhoff, Noam Chomsky, Thomas Edison) and an animal (e.g., lion, dachshund, rabit, Komodo dragon). And each story has a title page with an illustration by Sharon McGill. (Hannah Tinti's 2004 collection, Animal Crackers, also concerned animals and had illustrated title pages for the stories, but the collections are, of course, very different.)

Out of curiosity, I contacted Denise Oswald, Editorial Director of Softskull (although it was founder Richard Nash who had acquired the book before he left the company). She put me in touch with Millet and the cover's designer, Jamie Keenan (who has done many arresting book covers). According to Keenan:

"I'd had the sticker on a banana idea for a while but never managed to get it through. After thinking about the monkeys in the title, I instantly thought of the banana idea. Softskull had no problem with the title being so small. In fact, when I sent them the comps for this, they were just about to publish a book called Rebels With Attitude, which has a banana on the cover and no type at all, so they probably thought I was playing it safe."

According to Richard Nash:

"The second Jamie suggested the sticker I loved it. I got our production manager to price it immediately in the hope I'd be able to make it happen, and it was pretty cheap!"

And here's Lydia Millet's account:

"I can't take credit either for the cover and its boldness or the interior illustrations, but I will say the cover is one of my favorites among my own books and the drawings inside have a heartbreaking quality for me. I walk around showing them to others proudly.

"It was Maria Massie, my agent, who thought of asking Jamie Keenan to do the cover and Richard Nash who actually asked him — and curiously, no one at Counterpoint ever quibbled (at least, with me) over the minuscule title print. And I didn't mind it at all in this case — the title incidentally is not my own, that is, it was Harry Harlow's title, the title of a famous paper he wrote on taking baby monkeys away from their mothers, his so-called maternal deprivation experiments.

"I will say this: If you look closely, you'll see the cover's banana is broken. We originally had an intact banana. Then that particular image turned out to be excessively costly. So I was asked, We can get this other, slightly broken banana for hundreds of dollars cheaper. Is that a problem? I said no. I welcomed the broken banana.

"But I like the symbolism. These days, apparently, you can't even buy an unbroken banana without breaking the bank."

By the way, Keenan also designed the cover of Joe Meno's The Great Perhaps. He's another Massie client and, of course, a 2008 Story Prize finalist.

Mystery Back Cover Revealed: John Grisham's Ford County

The results are in. The unadorned back cover I previously posted belongs to none other than John Grisham's Ford County. Blogger Kathleen Gerard was the first to correctly identify the title of the book and will be getting a copy, courtesy of The Story Prize. Thanks to all who sent their guesses.

What struck me about this particular back cover was the absence of review quotes, blurbs, an author photo, or a description of the book. Indeed, all the collection really needs to sell it is two of the words on the front cover: John and (especially) Grisham, a brand so powerful it speaks for itself. Needless to say, out of the 78 entries we received for The Story Prize, this was the only one that had such a clean back cover. And the book, despite being a collection of short stories and not a novel, jumped right to the top of many best-seller lists (the fifth best-selling story collection this year, joining those by Uwem Akpan, Stephen King, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Elizabeth Strout).

Ford County is crafty and fun to read, and Grisham is a very skillful storyteller. I confess, I've seen movies based on his books but never before so much as picked one up. Some might call it snobbery, but I think it's more a matter of demographics. People with my background and interests, for the most part, generally don't read Grisham. And the books I generally read are unlikely to find their way into the hands of most of Grisham's readers. Of course there's an overlap, but I doubt it's very large because the audience for literary fiction isn't very large to begin with. In any event, I'd encourage more readers to cross those lines both ways—Grisham readers who haven't done so before might also enjoy reading stories by Alice Munro, William Trevor, and many others.

The short story has become a genre form in many respects, but its roots (as everyone knows) are as a form of entertainment. Before radio and television, short stories appeared in newspapers and many more magazines than today, pitched to the public at large. For the short story to thrive and grow, readers and writers must avoid embracing marginality. I love well-executed stories that value language above all else, those that are character-centric, those that are multi-layered, and those that are cleverly conceptual. But let's not forget the value of plot. Readers and students of short fiction could learn a lot about storytelling from reading the stories in John Grisham's Ford County.

The Back Cover

The back cover of this book is rather striking. Why? Because, aside from the UPC code, there's nothing on it. It's a recently published short story collection. Any guesses as to the title and author? The first to send an answer to info@thestoryprize.org, and explain how he or she knew, wins a copy. (And no trying to read the ISBN number, please).

Book Design: Flipping Through Pieces for The Left Hand

We've received 76 entries for The Story Prize. Thanks to all who submitted books. That's a lot of short story collections, and we have our work cut out for is in the weeks ahead as we prepare to choose our finalists early in January.

Many of the collections we've received are well-designed. A few, in particular, stand out. One of these is J. Robert Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand, published by Graywolf Press. The paperback book has an appealing small trim size. The cover is a paint-by-numbers image of a walking man that suits the contents well. On the bottom right corner of each page is a silhouette of a man in different stages of walking (I had to mangle the book a bit to scan in all five figures), and if you flip through the pages he glides through the motions. (This isn't the first time a literary work has used the flip book concept. The last 12 pages of Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also makes use of this device.)

According to Erin Kottke, marketing manager at Graywolf:

"The idea for the walking man (the flip book part) came from Ethan Nosowsky, our editor-at-large and the editor of John’s book(s). Actually, the walking man itself was his idea. John immediately liked both ideas. After we decided on the figure, Rachel Holscher had an illustrator [Matt Schuler] draw it to match the image on the cover, which was Kyle Hunter’s (the cover designer’s) invention."

Author J. Robert Lennon, had this to say:

"The original 'walking man,' when flipped, looked a little like he was doing a moonwalk—we had the artist go back and add a couple of 'frames' to make the walk more natural.

"Graywolf originally presented me with two possible covers—one of them had the 'walking man' strolling across a musical staff...the background was a photograph of a hand, I think. I didn't like it—it was too representational, too much like one of those CNN graphics that try to get every element of the news story into the picture. The cover we went with looked great to me—almost like something Scandinavian, from the seventies, if that makes any sense. It had an aura of ad hoc mystery to it, which I think represented the contents quite well. The image, as I'm sure you've been told, is from the Smithsonian paint-by-numbers collection—something I hadn't known existed.

"I think the whole package is just perfect, and I know the sales have exceeded Graywolf's expectations—I think it has a lot to do with the size and style of the book, the way it feels like a literary artifact, rather than merely a collection of writing."

In my view, Graywolf did a great job with this book. While big commercial publishers often solicit the author's response to cover designs, one of the advantages in working with small presses is that they're often more responsive to author ideas and more willing to take chances.

By the way, beyond its clever packaging, Pieces for the Left Hand is an interesting collection of 100 very short stories, well worth reading.