The first moment I saw that one giant word “GIRLS” flash across the screen in all caps, I became utterly, hopelessly enamored of
Lena Dunham’s HBO television show. Yes, I know the endless criticisms, both reasonable and totally unreasonable. No matter. The show speaks to me like no other television show currently on air, and I am beyond excited that
it is back for a second season on Sunday.
But while Dunham’s lady-centered wry comedy may be singular in today’s television line-up, the world of literature is home to a multitude of books with the same appeal as
Girls, books that feature a certain kind of female protagonist (usually one coming of age) or a certain kind of female narrator (pointed, self-deprecating, and ultimately wise). These are books that -- like
Girls -- explore what it is like to be young and hungry -- hungry for love and hungry for sex, but most of all, hungry for recognition and hungry for adulthood. Ultimately, the girls in these books, like the girls of
Girls, are hungry to become the women they will one day be.
And yes, of course, the girls in question here, both on the show and in these books, are privileged enough that they are not literally hungry. Many of them are also privileged enough to live on their own in New York and to be more concerned with opportunity costs than financial costs. And yes, the girls in these books -- like on the television show -- are all white. I am not white (or at least I’m only half), but these happen to be the books that have jumped out at me, that made me feel as if something of my own life had been understood and articulated in a way that was both illuminating and reassuring. I welcome your suggestions for other books in the comments.
How Should a Person Be? by
Sheila Heti: Many comparisons have been made between Heti’s novel and
Girls, the most titillating of which obsess about both projects’ frank depictions of sex and shadows of autobiography. Less titillating but far more important are their shared concerns about the process of becoming an artist and also the intricacies of female friendship. The fictional Sheila and her best friend Margaux ostensibly fall out over a yellow dress, and Hannah and Marnie ostensibly fall out
over the rent/Marnie buying a book by Hannah’s nemesis/which one of them is “the wound,” but really, both fights are ultimately about boundaries, both artistic and personal. It’s no surprise that Sheila and Margaux patch things up (though I won’t spoil how), and we have yet to see where things go for Hannah and Marnie, but both brutally honest portrayals do full justice to the complexity of a crumbling friendship, whether it’s eventually resuscitated or not.
The Fallback Plan by
Leigh Stein: After graduating from college (with an oh-so-useful theater degree), 22-year-old Esther Kohler moves back home with her parents in suburban Illinois, where she takes a gig babysitting for the neighbors in order to pay her parents rent on her childhood bedroom. She quickly becomes involved with her charge’s father (shades of Jessa), as well as a Very Handsome friend her own age (complete with awkward -- completely, terribly, realistically awkward -- sex scene). Stein’s wry voice shines through the entire short novel, especially in the pages involving the Littlest Panda, a creation of Esther’s imagination that she wants to turn into a
Chronicles of Narnia-inspired screenplay. There is, of course, more to Esther’s lethargy and indecision than meets the eye, but her (and Stein’s) self-aware take on the self-pitying recession-grad generation is compelling reading even without the eventual reveal about Esther’s backstory.
The Dud Avocado by
Elaine Dundy: The protagonist of Dundy’s 1958 novel is Sally Jay Gorce, a 21-year-old American girl, straight out of college and living abroad for two years on her uncle’s dime. The cult classic was widely praised (by the disparate likes of
Ernest Hemingway and
Groucho Marx) when it was originally released, and attained cult status anew when NYRB Press reissued it in 2007 (and not just because of the nude figure on the cover). Of all the girls on this list, Gorce seems most like the proto-
Girl -- a girl who is self-avowedly “hellbent on living,” getting herself into (and out of) escapade after escapade during her time in France. Many of Gorce’s misadventures involve a heavy dose of slapstick, starting on page one with our introduction to our heroine, who is sitting at a Parisian bar having a morning cocktail, wearing an evening dress because all her other clothes are at the cleaners.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1: 1931-1934 by
Anaïs Nin: When Hannah’s diary
got her into a mess of trouble, she probably took comfort in the tradition of great literary diarists before her, of whom Anaïs Nin is the reigning queen. In Volume One (of the six expurgated adult diaries), Nin talks freely -- one might say obsessively -- about
Henry Miller and his wife
June, her psychoanalysis, and her relationship with her father. But you don’t read Nin’s diaries for the plot points so much as the arcs of emotion and insight, as well as the searing descriptions of her friends and their relationships, (
sound familiar, Marnie and Charlie?). Still, Nin perhaps has more in common with Jessa than with Hannah, as in this entry, reminiscent of the Jessa-ism that is
possibly the most famous line from Season One of Girls: “Psychoanalysis did save me because it allowed the birth of the real me, a most dangerous and painful one for a woman, filled with dangers; for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men…I may not become a saint, but I am very full and very rich. I cannot install myself anywhere yet; I must climb dizzier heights.” Then again, Jessa would never be caught dead “journaling.”
The Lone Pilgrim by
Laurie Colwin: In this collection of stories, the women are farther along the path to adulthood than Hannah and her crew -- many are married, own homes, have stable careers -- but they are no less lost. These are stories about new lovers and ex-lovers and the complexities of romantic love in all its forms, stories in which the women seek love as a form of stability but also rebel against the expectations of a relationship.
In a turn that Jessa would appreciate, one of Colwin’s young female characters gets married in order to prove that she’s serious-minded, but meanwhile maintains a constant low-level high throughout the courtship and marriage. Beyond their thematic overlap, the stories are linked by Colwin’s diamond-sharp prose and emotional acuity. At the end of the collection’s eponymous story, Colwin writes of a woman who has married the man she loves and whose life appears to be in place, “Those days were spent in quest -- the quest to settle your own life, and now the search has ended. Your imagined happiness is yours…It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find.”
I Was Told There’d Be Cake by
Sloane Crosley: Crosley’s first collection of essays covers well-trodden 20-something-living-in-New-York ground, mostly having to do with a privileged class of horrors: the horrible first boss, the horrors of getting locked out of your apartment, the horrors of moving (from one Upper West Side apartment to another), the horrors of being a maid-of-honor. Still, Crosley’s sardonic and self-aware take on those seemingly unremarkable rites of passage elevates them to true moments of insight and recognition. Not to mention laugh-out-loud (or at least smile visibly) lines like: “People are less quick to applaud as you grow older. Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there.” And as we know, Dunham loves a good bathroom scene. Hannah Horvath couldn’t have said it better herself.
The Group by
Mary McCarthy: When
The Group was first published in 1963,
Norman Podhoretz dismissed it as “a trivial lady writer’s novel,” the kind of criticism that has dogged female artists -- and has already, unsurprisingly, been hurled at Lena Dunham -- throughout time. Of course, McCarthy’s novel, which follows a group of eight female friends after they graduate from Vassar and move to New York City in the 1930s, is anything but trivial. At the time it was published,
The Group was considered revolutionary -- it was banned in Australia while simultaneously spending two years on
The New York Times bestseller list. A full 50 years after its publication (and 80 years after the story’s events), the novel’s satire-tinged account of the women’s lives offers a nuanced portrait of love and sex and birth control, marriage and divorce, childbirth and breastfeeding, professional ambition and thwarted dreams, and the fluctuations of female friendship.
The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by
Melissa Bank: This collection of linked short stories centers around Jane Rosenal, who, like so many intelligent young female protagonists, works in publishing in New York City. The collection does not exactly follow Jane’s personal search for love, though her love life figures largely in the stories; instead, the stories act more like a romantic education, as Jane observes and interacts with different forms of love as she makes her way from teenager to young woman to adult. Last in the collection, the title story descends into rom-com territory, though
Zosia Mamet might be able to work the same miracle with its one-dimensional material -- a discussion of
The Rules and a final moral to Be Yourself -- as she has with the hilarious but terribly flat character of Shoshanna. Still, Bank’s sprightly prose and sympathetic voice run through all the stories, making for an engaging, enjoyable read.
Emma by
Jane Austen: Lena Dunham has said that
Clueless ranks among her influences, and there would be no
Clueless (and perhaps no Hannah Horvath) without Jane Austen’s original meddlesome, egotistic, incredibly flawed heroine, Emma. While Hollywood would have you read
Emma as a straight rom-com -- and Emma as an unimpeachable heroine -- it’s better read the classic novel with the same lens of dramatic irony that the discerning viewer applies to
Girls. Hannah is not supposed to be a character who makes all the right decisions; we root for Hannah, but we do not necessarily agree with her every move. In Emma’s case, the close reader cannot necessarily even root for her by the end; if you pay attention, Emma is revealed to be much closer to the original Mean Girl rather than the perfect innocent portrayed in the movies. Just like Hannah, Emma is clueless; we can only hope that by the end of
Girls, Hannah will have grown up more than Austen’s beloved-but-actually-kind-of-terrible protagonist.
Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women by
Nora Ephron: Although a few of the essays in Ephron’s landmark collection are somewhat prohibitively dated (the ones concerning Watergate, in particular, rely on a detailed knowledge of the scandal that is unlikely in 2013), most are as relevant today as they were when Ephron wrote them 40 years ago. The best known in the collection, “A Few Words About Breasts,” tackles standards of female beauty that would ring all-too-true for Hannah (remember that
cruel scene in which Jessa and Marnie bond by laughing about how small Hannah’s breasts are?). Ultimately, though, the collection’s real legacy is its examination of the Women’s Movement, a reminder -- all-too-relevant in today’s political atmosphere -- of the struggle for the gender equality (or at least semblance of it) that many 20-something women have simply grown up with. In the final essay of the collection, Ephron offers a piece of wisdom that might benefit the girls of
Girls as they continue on with their belated coming-of-age: “I was no good at all at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand, I am not half-bad at being a woman.”
Image Credit:
Wikipedia
The UK cover of the Hilary Mantel looks better digitally than it does in real life: the real thing looks a bit too pink and soft, completely the wrong impression for a book that is far from soft.
{And the marketing person in me wanted to tear out my hair when I saw it: you’ve got a novel about the court of Henry VIII with an enigmatic title . . . and you’re not going to do anything to help tell people what and when it’s about? It doesn’t seem to have mattered, since the book was so good that it found its audience, but still, it seemed like the publishers were unnecessarily tying one hand behind their back.}
Love this post and the commentary. Max, do you know of any blogs dedicated to this topic? Would love to learn more about the art of book jacket design.
The American jacket of my last book, The Ice Chorus, nearly derailed my career. Booksellers couldn’t give it away in spite of great reviews. The Brits did a much better job. Because we (Americans) are toddlers when it comes to consuming, jackets are often designed for the lowest common denominator of the demographic target, rather than for the book itself.
Great post. I love book covers. That British Low Boy cover is surprisingly bad. Looks like a mid-90s movie poster about techno-raves or some nonsense. Luckily the US one is great.
Poornima, The Book Design Review blog was a great resource. Unfortunately it is is on “indefinite hiatus” since January. Fortunately, it has a large and wonderful archive of posts.
http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com/
The US version of Marlon James is a mess – are two blurbs really necessary? Overall, I’d score it 6-4 in favor of the UK, with the UK winners being the last six – Shamsie, Mantel, Tower, Moore, James and Atwood. Out of all these covers, the UK Wells Tower is my favorite.
Excellent post and thanks for the link, Joel. I wish I’d known about that sooner.
Every week or two I impose my limited knowledge and unfounded design opinions on random books. Oddly, under the same title.
http://burrowpress.com/tag/judging-a-book-by-its-cover/
“If you’ve read this book, you’ll know that the American cover is ridiculous. The U.K. cover, meanwhile, is close to perfect.”
For those of us who HAVEN’T read the book, the US version is really intriguing… the sand, the stairs, the red glow. The UK version, on the other hand, is a line drawing of a white house. On blue. Which tells me nothing. Totally boring and unevocative and unappealing to me.
FWIW, the “K” in Kingsolver on the UK jacket doesn’t bleed off the edge. It does in the image at Amazon.co.uk; it doesn’t on the Faber and Faber site. I always found a publisher’s site to be a more reliable image resource than Amazon.
CKHB, that’s a great point! I agree that it is more enticing to one who hasn’t ready, and that’s what matters after all, potential disappointment be damned.
Joseph, Thanks for the correction; that does make the UK Kingsolver cover slightly less intriguing to me. We hope your BDR site returns from its hiatus some day!
Joel, thank you for the heads up. Will definitely check out the blog you recommended.
I like that the UK cover lets me know immediately what is meant by the title of “The Help.” The US version is one of those pretty, generic things they stick on women’s books.
The UK cover for Let the Great World Spin is inexcusable.
On Wolf Hall, I would have thought that UK readers would be so familiar with the ‘logo’ of the Tudor rose that it (especially when combined with the rough wood texture) would shout historical novel. This seems a good case of there being a real need for two versions.
i’ve just judged a UK novel competition and was surprised by 1) the range in quality of book jacket design – why would publishers neglect such an obvious marketing tool – and 2) yes, how the cover influenced my expectations to the extent there was a least one novel I would not have picked off the bookshelf and would therefore have missed a good read…
I loved your article/list – as an Indie-Bound bookstore owner, I find it interesting/intriguing the way folks pick up a book (when not handsold by their favorite bookseller :) – sometimes I just think they like the cover!
I heard Umberto Eco speak a few years back at a national ABA meeting about the importance of graphics/color/design in books – and I truly believe it should extend to the covers of books – I treasure my signed/first edition books because I also have their covers in excellent shape!
Thanks for the info –
Kathleen
Of the ones I’ve read…
Wolf Hall – agree with Bridget Whelan. Also, the blurb on the flyleaf is impressively well-written, especially given the sheer size of the novel.
The Year of the Flood – the UK cover is one of the best I’ve seen/stroked in ages. What you can’t tell on here is that it’s deliciously embossed. Edibly good.
The Lacuna – Much prefer the American cover for its boldness. It’s a bold novel.
Of those I haven’t…
I’d reach for the UK cover of Let the World Spin before the US one
It’s funny, I’ve seen the UK cover for Let the Great World Spin in Canada and most of the rest I’ve seen the US cover.
I agree completely with Max’s assessment of the Lorrie Moore. I’ve read it and it’s definitely better represented by the UK cover. Perhaps it’s more enticing, but it also doesn’t do the writer justice. Her prose is new and fresh feeling, while that cover seems… old. Screams prairie fiction to me.
@ poornima – Check out http://covers.fwis.com/
They seem to be having some technical difficulties right now, but it’s a great space where lots of designers discuss book covers.
This confirms to me that there is no universal right or wrong in cover design nor a clear distinction according to nationality. We respond individually to a cover in the light of what we know and have experienced and from our own prejudices.
Having worked as an independent bookseller in both the US and UK the difference in covers is always incredibly interesting (and often confusing).
One of my favourite marked differences was with Memoirs of a Geisha. Striking and original in the UK. Totally missable in the US.
On these titles, I agree with Bridget that UK book buyers would instantly be able to judge the content of Mantel’s book. In addition I think they’d be able to instantly recognise it as literary fiction (compared say with the more genre-typical covers of C. J. Sansom’s excellent Shardlake novels).
I agree also that the UK covers on the first too royally suck, whilst the UK Atwood cover leaves the US one standing in about 1992… very disappointing job.
I think that the UK Burnt Shadows cover is OK though, fitting in with other UK covers of a similar ilk. Unlike the US cover it wouldn’t deter male fiction readers over here, a situation likely reversed in The Book of Night Women.
Oh, and a note to say that at a glance, or maybe on gut reaction, I’d have mistaken the Kingsolver for a Salman Rushdie. I wonder which would be less pleased?!
Nice article. Great comments.
I’m just gonna assume from these covers that American publishers don’t trust their readers abilities. Just to reinforce the obvious the American covers state “A novel’. Maybe they should print ‘now turn the page’ at the bottom of every page too.
About Wolf Hall, in my opinion the Canadian edition is rather well done… it points to historical fiction without being too obvious about what it’s about. In my opinion the use of portraits (even truncated portraits) as in the American edition is overdone. I rather like the UK edition, however.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DpbzQjeiDuo/SujR0gNEahI/AAAAAAAAA70/oucfBWVlDto/s320/Wolf+Hall
Another website for book covers is causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.
Excellent article, and some apt analysis. I’ve put a link at http://www.hyraxia.com. I’ve always thought of UK covers as being a little more simplistic, as though it shouldn’t matter, though this is certainly changing.
Really, Sarah? The American ‘toddlers’ did your last book in, not the snobbish, superior attitude of it’s author? *cough* How interesting.
That being said, I’m in the lovely position of being able to travel between the US and Ireland frequently (Ireland generally gets the UK editions), and often get to see the different covers. Sometimes I even wait to buy a book if I know I can get a prettier edition in another country; for example I buy my Flashman novels with the UK cover only…they’re fantastic, while the US ones are utterly uninspired.
Anyway, the biggest UK failure I’ve seen is the cover for Like Water for Elephants. It’s a big, sparkley mess that looks terrible in person, especially when compared to the subtle American one which gives a sense of mystery. Meanwhile, on the US end, their cover for The Book Thief (dominoes?!) is pointless rubbish compared to the UK one: a sweet girl and Death dancing down the road. Each side has their own sins to atone for, I think.
This is a great article! I love the comparisons you chose, and I agree with most of your statements. I never noticed how much a cover appeals or turns me away from a book. How interesting that publishers think their audiences are so different.
Thanks for this post. I am in Melbourne Australia. I have seen BOTH the US and UK versions of Barbara Kingsolver’s THE LACUNA in my local bookstores. I guess it depends on who owns the bookstores! But the indies stock the AUST/UK version. On closer inspection this morning, however, (and after reading this post) I looked more closely. Our Australian cover of THE LACUNA is taken from the UK one, though a little changed. Ours has the same painting, without the ripped text look over it. It also misses out on the ‘bleed’ of the type to the left. Which led me to wonder if the bleed is intentional. I don’t think it is, as nice as it looks. The whole type is off midline. I checked some other pages and I think I shall stand by my thoughts. Right to the source, Faber and Faber, show this as the UK cover http://tinyurl.com/yanoeyk . This is the slightly different AUST cover http://tinyurl.com/yd7r8lg . Nowhere do I see the bleed. Nice as it is, It’s not intentional. BTW, this is the paperback UK cover – different again. http://tinyurl.com/yc5ax6r
BTW, if you want a great example ot cover text bleed, an obvious example is the great cover of THINGS WE DIDN’T SEE COMING by Steven Amsterdam http://tinyurl.com/yjf7jt3 (great little story, too) . The Australian version http://tinyurl.com/dap3hz
agree with the Margaret Atwood and Mantel covers, they are both intoxicating
Strange to see that the covers differ so greatly. I knew that each country has a custom cover but is seems it is little control on how the cover should look. As a designer it seem there is a lot of ups and downs in this selection. The comment about what Umberto Eco said is ever so true. Think of how much goes into product and packaging design. A book is a product and if the cover doesn’t give you any idea about the book, there is a problem.
I like that the American edition of “Wolf Hall” makes the title nice and big, so us dumb hicks know which is the title and which is the author. Of course, seeing the two covers side by side like that, it becomes even more confusing which is which if you’re not familiar with the author, since the orders have been reversed between the two countries!
I count myself among said dumb hicks, of course.
I liked the idea of comparing covers for same book published for different regions. As a book cover designer I enjoy comparing and watching work of other book cover designers. i also do same type of comparison with my optional covers and finalized covers. Thanks for sharing all these b’ful book covers.
Cool article! I love it. To continue the comparisons, I recommend following @CoverSpy and @CoverSpyLondon on Tumblr and Twitter — we’ve got cover spies in New York and London who blog and tweet cover images of the books we catch people reading around our cities. (Also http://www.coverspy.com and http://www.coverspylondon.tumblr.com.) On March 17, both UK and US spies caught readers of The Year of Magical Thinking: http://coverspylondon.tumblr.com/post/454215553 and http://coverspy.tumblr.com/post/454710482
Cheers!