When I look back at the book covers of 2009 and pick a favorite, there’s a very good chance it will be that of Joe Meno’s The Great Perhaps, designed by Jaime Keenan. I love the curious mix of images: a squid, a plane, a bird and a bomb. I love that they’re all plopped right on top of each other, as if they got dumped into the document and just happened to form a nice Hydra right like that. But what I really love and admire is the choice to differentiate them from each other by extracting the magenta layer from one, the black layer from another, and so on. The squid is so appealing, I’m happy he’s the one who got to keep all his parts. And then that black blob (squid ink?) on top of it all for the type to sit in. It’s just so chic and whimsical; I’m dying to know what any of it means. 

As we reach the end of Short Story Month, I want to call attention to the work of an unidentified man from Georgia, known only as the Short Story Reader. The Web is full of short fiction, of course, but isn’t always easy to ferret out. That doesn’t slow Short Story Man down. He finds it, he reads it, and he shares his thoughts—as well as the all-important link. 

Well, here’s a whole bunch of something that I like: a new series of slender collections of older short stories, packaged up in clean, modern and inexpensive editions. As an added bonus, each one comes paired with a contemporary story by a complementary author. (Conveniently also Harper Perennial authors—it’s a good marketing idea.) The Wilde is matched with a Simon Van Booy story; Cather comes paired up with Lydia Peelle; Tolstoy with Holly Goddard Jones. There are three others, but you get the idea. The design of the series alludes to this combination of old and new, featuring vintage cut-out paper-doll-like photographs of the “main” author balanced by a modern, sophisticated type treatment that stays the same from title to title. The second author isn’t supported on the cover, so it’s a nice surprise when you open one up. Harper has a hit on its hands, I think, as each volume clocks in at ten bucks or less. I know I want them all.

Someone at HarperCollins recently seized on the idea that readers don’t really care about publication dates, only about good books, and launched a blog called Backlist. At the top of the site, they define “backlist” as “a book published over one year ago,” though in reality—in average publisher/publicist behavior and presentation—backlist is anything not published within the last couple of months. But the blog is dedicated to highlighting one “older” book every day. Typically the books are chosen out of some relevance—the author or topic is in the news for whatever reason, it’s a birthday or anniversary of some sort, etc.—but, regardless of criteria, it’s lovely to see a publisher paying attention to books they’ve published and are still warehousing. Maybe it’s just crazy enough to catch on!

I’ve been stockpiling Roberto Calasso books for years, because a) there’ve been several fantastic covers and b) I like to think I’m smart enough to appreciate the contents. (As long as I go on not reading them, we never have to know!) I saw his latest, Tiepolo Pink in the Knopf catalog—in black and white!—and swooned. A new Calasso! And so pretty! I should have guessed it was Peter Mendelsund’s work (as I learned when the color version turned up at the Book Cover Archive). It’s so perfect. Put a Tiepolo fresco on the “ceiling” of a plain box and the box instantly reads as a gallery—a contemporary space for viewing and reflecting on the work. Plus it has that “do come in” attraction about it. Unfortunately, there’s no seeing it in the flesh until October.

Such a simple and terrific concept this one: How Books Got Their Titles. Every day Gary Dexter posts a little essay explaining where a book’s name came from. The titles are generally well-known and aren’t necessarily all that unusual—you’ll find E.E. Cummings’ No Thanks as well as Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World—but their origins aren’t self-evident from simply reading the books. He’s been doing this for a few months now, and the research and pace are both impressive. Some of the best entries are about titles you mistakenly thought you knew the story behind, or those you never thought to question.

Bonus points for giving his blog about inscrutable titles has such a profoundly, er, scrutable one. And thanks to Jose Furtado for the link.

Yeah, so this is really more about the entire package rather than just the cover. Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is crammed to the margins with little doodle-y drawings and maps and footnotes. The drawings reference dictionary illustrations and artists’ sketches and drunken cocktail napkin notes but they all add up to something larger, some way of subtly enhancing what is actually a pretty straightforward narrative. And it’s all just incredibly, mind-bogglingly beautiful. Are the little hoo-has and doo-whats absolutely necessary to make the story better? Probably not, but they certainly make it more fun, like those dopey “Easter eggs” do on DVDs. The cover itself is pretty obviously lifted from the oeuvre of Joseph Cornell and I think it’s a tiny bit underbaked in comparison to the interior—it’s pretty, but I wish it had the sparky, improvised energy of the interior scratches. Significantly, there’s no designer credit, so I wonder if Larsen did it himself and chickened out when it came to reflecting the interior, or if Penguin Press took it away from him in an effort to smooth it out. Or wait! I bet it’s the legendary Barnes & Noble jackhole who supposedly gets a vote when it comes to choosing covers. Let’s blame her, even though she’s probably going to be downsized in about five minutes. If we’re lucky.

If you were to draw a Venn diagram of a) people who like to read and b) people who like food, the center section—c) people who like to read about food—would be enormous. There’s something about food and mealtime that’s consistently enhanced in the process of description. Eating is intensely personal and at the same time universal, and it lends itself to memoir, metaphor and myth. Lashings and Lashings of Ginger Beer is an ongoing compendium of memorable literary food, from classics to contemporary, Nikolai Gogol on Christmas Eve dinner to Tama Janowitz on bad New York diner food, and of course Proust‘s madeleines. The three contributors have collected a mouthwatering sampler of tasty writing, nicely indexed by foodstuff, author and title. There’s something for whatever you’re craving—in my case, just in time for summer (which would have been his winter), Pablo Neruda’s ode to the tomato: “It sheds / its own light, / benign majesty.”

(Thanks to Maud for the link.)

Making an HBO version of a cult-classic documentary is one thing. Making a book about it is a different challenge altogether. No doubt timed to coincide with the former, the latter is the work of the Maysles family, and like the original, it’s called simply Grey Gardens. But how do you convey, in print, the crazy jumbledy bohemian squalor captured in the original film? They’ve presented everything in what is basically a mash-up of documentary imagery and naive collage, and taken a kitchen sink approach to the cover. Half of me wishes it was a more competent (more artful) collage, while the other half thinks it’s exactly as it should be. Either way, I am getting this book asap.

I’m repeating myself a tiny bit, but I hope you’ll forgive me. Dan Wickett has one of the most respected litblogs out there—his Emerging Writers Network—and what better time to highlight it than on the first day of Short Story Month, which he’s been celebrating in May for a few years now. This year, he’s set the ambitious goal of reading and writing about three stories per day. “By month’s end, if all goals are met, just under 100 short stories will have been read and commented upon.” That’s worth tuning in for.

Recently Published

• “The Great Perhaps” by Joe Meno by Karen Templer
• Short Story Reader by Karen Templer
• Harper’s Short Fiction Mash-ups by D.G. Strong
• Backlist by Karen Templer
• “Tiepolo Pink” by Roberto Calasso by Karen Templer

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