This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.” That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist?
As it turned out, I was not the first to consider the provocation. The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.
Still, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I found online so I decided to get a second opinion — or rather, eight more opinions. I reached out to the foremost scholars of Russian literature as well as avid lay readers I know and asked if they’d be willing to contribute 500 words weighing the respective merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Almost everyone said yes, though a few echoed the sentiments of a distinguished emeritus professor who replied to me from a beach in Mexico, writing, “There really is no competition on Parnassus. From my point of view at least, they are both great writers and now live in a realm beyond competition.” And of course that’s true — just as it’s true that it is fun (and often illuminating) to debate Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic even though at the end of the day we acknowledge that they’re all irreducibly great.
So with that, enjoy eight very knowledgeable, passionate takes on two of the great storytellers of all time. And when you’re done reading, please go ahead and share your own views in the comments section.
Carol Apollonio, Professor of the Practice of Russian, Duke University
The question shot straight into my brain and disabled the parietal cortex. There was a sizzle and a puff of smoke, and the smell of sulfur filled the air. I groped in the dark for a 50-kopeck piece and tossed it upwards. It clinked hollowly on the linoleum. The flickering light of the candle from above illuminated the tiny but unmistakable image of the double-headed eagle. Heads up: Dostoevsky, then.
His protagonist is the head: bait for smart people. The intellect sends forth an unending flow of words. YES! You’ve thought this exact same thing so many times! How can there be justice on earth if it comes at the cost of a child’s tear? How can God be all good and all powerful, yet allow suffering in the world? If God exists, then how can he allow ME to walk the earth, sick, sniveling, spiteful creature that I am, scrawny spawn of the most abstract and premeditated city on the earth? If God does not exist, though, how can I be a captain? Should I return my ticket? Read on! They give us the bread that we ourselves have made, and we accept it back from them in exchange for our freedom: cheap sorcery in place of miracle. I love mankind, but how can you expect me to love the stinking, jabbering drunk across the table, the loser who sold his own daughter into prostitution so he could sit here and drink? Prove that you exist, then! Move this mountain, and I will believe!
His protagonist is the head, but his hero is the heart. Logic and words will get you nowhere: the more talk, the less truth. Twice two is four, but twice two is five is a charming little thing too. A hug, now, a kiss, a fall to the earth, a leg over the iron railing of a cold St. Petersburg bridge, a pouring forth of tears, a pouring forth of blood, a turning pale, a fainting dead away, an issuing forth of the spirit of decay, a slamming of your own finger in the door, the plaintive sounds of a pipe-organ on the street, ragged orphans begging, the dying gasps of the overworked, bludgeoned horse, the barely detectable breathing of the doomed old woman on the other side of the closed door — you, YOU are the murderer — the clink of coins in the cup, the dizzying whirl of the roulette wheel, brain fever, a silhouette in the doorway, the noble young lady bowing down to the earth before you, YOU, you lustful worm! Shrieks, a rope, a gun, a slap on the cheek, and suddenly…
Suddenly an image appears in the darkness: a thin, timid girl in a green shawl, her face pale and drawn from illness. She smiles joyfully and stretches out her hand to me. I must go, for if I do not, I will keep on talking and will never stop….
Ellen Chances, Professor of Russian Literature, Princeton University
The question, in my mind, is meaningless. One of the worrisome tendencies of contemporary society is its impulse to rank. Who is better? Who is Number One? The question should not be, “Who is the greater novelist?,” but rather, “What do I learn from reading the books of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, or of anyone else?
Why does everything have to be a race? Why does everything have to be competitive? This implies that there is a winner and a loser. Why does the reading of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or of anyone else have to be part of a “success” or “failure” story? Framing the question, “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: Who’s the better novelist?,” in this way does a disservice, it seems to me, to the act of contemplating the meaning of these writers’ books.
Asking the question is equivalent to asking, “Which is the greater food, milk or orange juice? Which is the greater food, blueberries or strawberries? Which is better, the sky or the grass, night or day?”
To me, both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are equally great writers. Each focused on some of the important “big questions” of life. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, in The Brothers Karamazov, asked how a just God could have created a world that includes the suffering of innocent children. Tolstoy, through his character, Levin, in Anna Karenina, asked what the meaning of life is. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy asserted that the essence of life cannot be found by relying on the intellect alone. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy understood that being true to the authentic rhythms of life means respecting the non-linear nature of life.
Each of the two offers profound insights about psychology. Tolstoy emphasizes the ways in which people relate to one another in a societal context. Dostoevsky digs deeply into the individual human psyche. Tolstoy paints a world in which extreme things happen to ordinary people. Dostoevsky shows us the extremes of which people are capable. Each of the two writers describes crises in faith. Each describes the journey to a life of spiritual values.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy write in a way that conveys the energy of life. That energy comes about, in Dostoevsky, through the clash of ideas, through the tension he creates through suspense and the use of words like “suddenly.” Ivan Karamazov says that he loves life more than the meaning of life. Tolstoy shows a love of life of this world – the smell of the earth, the beauty of a flower. He speaks about living a life of authenticity.
Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy make me think about what is important in life. Both urge the reader to appreciate those things that money or competition cannot bestow – love, and life itself…
…So who is the greater writer, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy? Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are great…And then there is Chekhov, and Pushkin, and Mandelstam and Akhmatova and Bitov… And that’s just the Russians…
Raquel Chanto, Graduate Student, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs
It is likely that these words express more about me than about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. I have long ago given up on the idea of objective appraisal of literature: reading is a much more mediated process than we would like to admit. All sorts of ghosts crawl into the pages, a prehistory of tastes and experiences and prejudices and fears. So if I say Dostoevsky is a greater writer than Tolstoy, I only mean he has been greater to me.
My first encounter with Russian literature was as random as can be expected for a twelve-year-old girl growing up in suburban Costa Rica. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky emerged like potatoes out of a giant plastic bag containing several books of ranging worth. I was lucky enough to be, at the time, very young, very curious and seriously uninformed. Unlike most people, I read War and Peace without having the faintest idea of the book’s reputation. Crime and Punishment followed shortly after, with the same scandalous lack of veneration. I loved them both: Tolstoy, for the story he told, and Dostoevsky, for the thoughts he provoked.
Many years and many books later, the two authors continue to inhabit different places in my mind and in my memory. Tolstoy conjures up images of endless steppes and elegant Petersburg homes, where great and complex characters go about the business of living. His books are showcases of literary craftsmanship, epic tales told with impeccable skill. Dostoevsky’s work is less precise, more ambiguous. I experience his books as a ceaseless battle of demons that never rest — not even as you turn the page, as you end a chapter, as you finish the novel and read it again. A Dostoevsky novel sitting on a shelf is a bowl of anxiety and confusion, a bundle of frustrations marked by a desperate need for redemption. His protagonists are shown in extreme situations, where not only their personality but their very nature is put to the test.
What I find mesmerizing in Dostoevsky is not just the details of the story, the particular twists and turns of the lives of Rodion Raskolnikov or Dmitri Karamazov; it is the mere possibility of their existence. It is, in the end, the mind-bending notion that we could be just like them — that any of us, any ordinary, simple human being, carries around the highest plane and the lowest point of moral capabilities. Tolstoy’s characters tell me a lot about themselves. Dostoevsky’s characters tell me a lot about myself. If that is not writing of the ultimate importance, I do not know what is.
Chris Huntington, author of the novel Mike Tyson Slept Here
Reading Tolstoy transports me to another world; reading Dostoevsky makes me feel alive in this one. As I’m reading Tolstoy, I’m drawn into a dream of serfs and country estates, endless royal titles and army ranks. So many beautiful horses! A loyal dog! Women like Kitty and Anna Karenina! But then I put the book down and I find myself using a coat hanger to get the hair out of the shower drain, and it doesn’t feel like the Battle of Austerlitz. It feels like my life again.
On the other hand, many times someone will frustrate me at work, and I hear these words from The Brothers Karamazov thundering in my head:
‘Why is such a man alive!’ Dmitri Fyodorovich growled in a muffled voice, now nearly beside himself with fury, somehow raising his shoulders peculiarly so that he looked almost hunchbacked. ‘No, tell me, can he be allowed to go on dishonoring the earth with himself?’
I say this kind of shit to myself all the time. It’s part of the fun of being alive.
As I lead my every day life (so unlike ice-skating in Moscow or cutting grain on my estates), just imagining that I resemble beautiful Levin is to invite self-ridicule. I like him more than he would like me. I’m not nearly as nice, nor as sincere. I find that I can openly admire Prince Myshkin, however, because in The Brothers Karamazov, I’m right there doing it. I’m Dmitri or Ivan, holding Alyosha’s hand. The message of the brothers is that we are all each other; we share each other’s passions. We suffer identically. We demonstrate things differently. I can be innocent and guilty both.
That, to me, is life.
Borges, I believe, said there was something adolescent about a love of Dostoevsky – that maturity demanded other writers. All I know is, when I first read Crime and Punishment, that book represented a lot of work for me. I didn’t get it! What did I have to feel so guilty about, at eighteen? I hadn’t DONE anything. I was frantic with potential energy. I would have been better off with War and Peace – because I had the temperament of Prince Andrei, ready to go to war. I was angry with myself and frustrated, but I had no major regrets. I certainly could never have understood Ivan Fyodorovich’s madness. I had just spent a summer drifting with a beautiful 17 year-old girl on Harrison Lake; if you’d asked me why Prince Myshkin pursued the troubled Nastassya or allowed the beautiful Aglaya to get away, I would have had no idea.
In adolescence, I was loyal with my friends, but also so fiercely uncompromising that I would never have endured a friend like Myshkin’s Rogozhin. That kind of bond would only come later for me, when I understood what it was like to tie myself to someone for life- when I understood what mutual forgiveness was. When I was in my early twenties, one of my friends drunkenly stabbed another. It wasn’t serious. One of my best friends asked me not to see a girl he’d broken up with. Instead, I married her. Later on, I lost her. I chased her in the snow, like Dmitri. I understand Dostoevsky now. What adolescent understands these things?
In any case, I realize that the “competition” between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is just an exercise in love. No one really has to choose one or the other. I simply prefer Dostoevsky. For my last argument, I will simply cite an expert far older and wiser than me:
Just recently I was feeling unwell and read House of the Dead. I had forgotten a good bit, read it over again, and I do not know a better book in all our new literature, including Pushkin. It’s not the tone but the wonderful point of view – genuine, natural, and Christian. A splendid, instructive book. I enjoyed myself the whole day as I have not done for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.
-Leo Tolstoy in a letter to Strakhov, September 26, 1880
Andrew Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy and Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literature, University of Virginia
All mediocre novelists are alike; every great novelist is great in his own way. Which is why the choice between nineteenth-century Russia’s two supreme prose writers ultimately boils down to the question of which kind of greatness resonates with a particular reader. My own sympathies are with Tolstoy, and even my criteria for judging a work of fiction, I admit, are relentlessly Tolstoyan.
“The goal of the artist,” Tolstoy wrote, “is not to solve a question irrefutably, but to force people to love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.” By this standard Tolstoy’s novels succeed where Dostoevsky’s fall short.
True, Dostoevsky saw and felt modern experience in all of its isolating, tragic depth. He showed the obsessive power of ideas and the psychological crises, cracks, and explosions of the soul that have become familiar in our modern world. What he doesn’t do, however, is make you love life in all its manifestations. In fact, when he tries to do so, he reveals his deficiencies.
At the end of Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov flings himself at the feet of Sonya, who has followed him to Siberia where he is serving his sentence for double homicide. Sonya jumps up, looks at him and trembles. “Infinite happiness lit up in her eyes; she understood, and for her there was no longer any doubt that he loved her, loved her infinitely, and that at last the moment had come…” If this smacks of modern soap opera or those maudlin French novels Dostoevsky was raised on, that’s because it is melodrama. Sonya’s “infinite love” is an ideal, “the moment” that has supposedly come, an abstraction.
What modern readers need, Tolstoy believed, is not more lurching after “infinite happiness” or “the Great Idea,” as Stepan Trofimovich, near the end of The Demons, claims to have discovered, but the ability to embrace an imperfect reality. The author of Anna Karenina teaches us how to seek meaning not through grandiose romantic strivings, like Anna and Vronsky, but within the limits of imperfect social and family structures, like Kitty and Levin.
Tolstoy’s novels depict the norms and continuities of human behavior by means of grand narratives that expand slowly over time and against the backdrop of vast natural tableaus. “As is usually the case” and “such as often occurs” are phrases you encounter frequently in Tolstoy. Dostoevsky’s world, by contrast, is one in which you can come home one evening and “suddenly” find an axe buried in your skull. Life is always on the verge of imploding on itself. Tragedy is just around the corner, or in your living room.
Tolstoy’s living room is a place where people, well, live. It’s where dark-eyed, voluble twelve-year old Natasha Rostova comes running with doll in hand, or where, a decade later, she enjoys with Pierre one of those endearingly mundane conversations between wife and husband about nothing and everything.
“I am a realist in a higher sense,” Dostoevsky rightfully claimed. But Tolstoy was a realist in the total sense. “The hero of my tale… is Truth,” he wrote. And that truth is one every generation recognizes as its own, not just those in a state of social crisis or existential despair. If Dostoevsky urges us to reach for the heavens, then Tolstoy teaches us by artistic example how we may touch the transcendent here and now in our messy, fleeting world.
Gary Saul Morson, Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Northwestern University
A Soviet anecdote has it that Stalin once asked the Central Committee: which deviation is worse, the right or the left? Some fearfully ventured “the left,” others hesitantly offered, “the right.” The Great Helmsman then gave the right answer: “Both are worse.” I answer the question, “Who is the greater novelist, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”: Both are better.
Dostoevsky spoke to the twentieth century. He was unique in foreseeing that it would not be an era of sweetness and light, but the bloodiest on record. With uncanny accuracy, The Demons predicted, in detail, what totalitarianism would be.
Bakhtin understood the core principle of Dostoevsky’s ethics: a person is never just the product of external forces. Neither heredity nor environment, singly or together, fully accounts for a human being. Each person retains a “surplus,” which constitutes the self’s essential element. True, some people, and all social sciences aspiring to resemble physics, deny the surplus. But they apply their theories only to others. No matter what he professes, nobody experiences himself as a mere play of external forces. Everyone feels regret or guilt, and there is no escaping the agony of choice. We behave as if we believed that each moment allows for more than one possible outcome and that our freedom that makes us in principle unpredictable. Without that unpredictability we would lack humanness. We would be zombies, and no one has ethical responsibility to zombies. Hence ethics demands: always treat another person as capable of surprise, as someone who cannot be explained entirely at second hand.
Dostoevsky despised both capitalism and socialism because each treats people as the mere product of economic (or other) laws. If socialism is worse, it is because it also presumes that experts know how to organize life for the best and socialism not only denies but actively removes choice for a supposedly higher good. At best, this view leads to the Grand Inquisitor, at worst to the nightmarish plans of Pyotr Stepanovich.
Tolstoy speaks more to the 21st century. His novels’ key concept was contingency. At every moment, however small and ordinary, something happens that cannot entirely be accounted for by previous moments. Like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy also denied the possibility of a social science, which must always wind up resembling the “science of warfare” preached by the generals in War and Peace. Like macroeconomists today, these “scientists” are immune to counter-evidence. To use Tolstoy’s word, social science is mere “superstition.”
If social scientists understood people as well as Tolstoy, they would have been able to depict a human being as believable as Tolstoy’s characters, but of course none has come close.
If we once acknowledge that we will never have a social science, then we will, like General Kutuzov, learn to make decisions differently. We intellectuals would be more cautious, more modest, and ready to correct our errors by constant tinkering.
If we have left the age of ideologies behind, we may need Dostoevsky’s warnings less than Tolstoy’s wisdom.
Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor of Russian and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, and author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy
I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.
Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental.
Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones.
Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima.
I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.
Joshua Rothman, graduate student in English at Harvard University, and author of the column, Brainiac, which appears every Sunday in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section
I have the usual reasons for thinking of Tolstoy as the “better” — really, as the best — novelist. There’s the incredible variety of scenes and subjects he explores; there’s his precise, uncluttered style; there’s his epic tone, with its special combination of detachment and humanity. And I’m always overpowered by the way his novels describe everyone from the inside, even the dogs and horses. I have the same reaction to Tolstoy’s writing as his sister-in-law, Tanya Bers, who was the model for Natasha in War and Peace: “I can see how you are able to describe landowners, fathers, generals, soldiers,” she told him, “but how can you insinuate yourself into the heart of a girl in love, how can you describe the sensation of a mother — for the life of me I cannot understand.” I think Tolstoy is better at “insinuating himself” than any other novelist.
It’s Tolstoy’s scenes, though, which impress me most. Tolstoy, I’m convinced, is the single greatest writer of scenes in literature. Dostoevsky is often given credit for being more “dramatic” (George Steiner, in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?, calls Dostoevsky “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare”). But Tolstoy’s novels are unique in the way they’re constructed entirely out of short, perfect, easy-to-read scenes, and in the way those scenes build on one another until they address the most complex issues in a nonchalant, natural way.
Take the run of scenes around Kitty and Vronsky’s ball in Anna Karenina. In the first scene, Kitty and Anna are sitting on a sofa. Kitty invites Anna to the ball, and suggests that she wear a lilac-colored dress. Then a gaggle of children run to Anna, Anna takes them in her arms, and the scene ends. Reading the scene, we understand that that’s how Kitty sees Anna: as a mysterious, beautiful, poetic young mother. Then, two scenes later, Kitty arrives at the ball, wearing a peach-colored dress, and sees Anna — in black velvet. That’s the scene when Anna steals Vronsky from Kitty. Right there, in the juxtaposition of those two scenes, which are only two or three pages apart, you have the difference between childhood and adulthood, and between sexual innocence and experience. No other novelist can show you so much, so quickly.
It’s not just that his short scenes move quickly, though; it’s that they let Tolstoy focus on very ordinary things, like the color of a dress. One of the best scenes at the end of Anna Karenina is organized around a thunderstorm; in War and Peace, he does two scenes around an oak tree, bare and then in bloom. In each scene, the details feel unremarkable — but, over many scenes, they assemble themselves into a structure that’s more than the sum of its parts. Tolstoy called that structure a “network.” Dostoevsky built up networks, too, of course, and in some ways they’re more powerful. But I prefer Tolstoy’s ordinary materials to Dostoevsky’s extraordinary ones, because they can teach you to uncover the “scenes” and “networks” in your own life.
Images of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky via Wikimedia Commons
It would be interesting to know the exact reasons of the publishing companies choices. Why a different cover on the other side of the Atlantic? The cover does make a difference for the reader, for example,I wanted to read ‘The Paris Wife’ by Paula Mc Lain but I waited until I could get the American edition which showed a woman in a blue suit obviously sitting at a Paris Café, it exactly reflected my fantasies before reading the novel whereas the Art Deco cover of the Canadian edition that I was able to get would not inspire me at all. Ironically, we also judge a book by its cover.
“There’s something too advertisement-slick about the U.S. version, while the British version has a dark playfulness that I like.”
Is that meant to be a joke? The U.S. cover for 1Q84 is one of the best things the novel has going for it. Chip Kidd made a brilliant design.
The top three American versions seem more sinister than the UK versions. I love the UK version of The Cat’s Table–the American one almost seems like a non-fiction history book or something.
I wouldn’t buy the UK vs. of The Art of Fielding because I have a ridiculous aversion to anything chalkboard. Bad reason not to buy a book? You betcha. Yet, it’s true! And why, why has a dog been shot and is bleeding mustard in the US vs. of The Devil All the Time??
This is very cool, and it makes me appreciate the trouble my publisher went through to get the cover for my book just right.
Always enjoy this feature. One of the ToB finalists you didn’t include, The Sisters Brothers, was probably my favorite cover of 2011. No surprise they basically kept it the same for the UK release.
The American Art of Fielding cover was another of my favorites – the throwback baseball font is terrific.
I disagree with your assessment of “1Q84,” since Chip Kidd’s design was the tipping factor in buying the book in the first place. (So I’m sure Knopf is happy about that one.) Especially considering the layering of the jacket and cover and the images over images. The U.K. one sees more generic to me. And I like the US “Marriage Plot” mostly because I think Rodrigo Corral makes interesting covers.
But what about Swamplandia! ? (Which the U.S. has over the U.K.)
My favorite ToB title Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl isn’t included! I don’t think the U.K. version is different, but the book takes place in London!
Arturo Ulises,
Are you saying that the top graphic designer in the business, making a cover for one of the larger books of the year, isn’t advertising slick? I love Kidd in general, but really, his Murakami covers are pretty much his worst work.
@jecqueline dubois
Most of these books are published by different publishing houses in different countries, so when the house gets the rights for the book, they often look at how it sold and if they feel they can improve upon the cover or make it pop more for the demographic they are trying to reach, not to mention whether they want to pay for the rights to the original artwork.
Many times it’s just cheaper to redesign a cover in-house and the designer will retain elements that they feel worked well on the original cover, as in those for OPEN CITY and THE ART OF FIELDING, which have fairly similar design choices.
I’m going to agree with Matt and Arturo–I think the American 1Q84 is great. Definitely better than the UK cover, which looks really busy.
Also, I think both State of Wonder covers are terrible, but especially the American one. It looks so bland and generic! I’ve heard good things about the book, but you’d never know it from that cover. I don’t know why, but Ann Patchett seems to get a lot of bad covers.
I hate the US cover of “Devil All the Time” — it looks like a giant turkey when I glance at it too quickly.
I got to say, I do actually prefer the red and yellow Open City far more. It’s a more intense color combo.
While in the UK this summer, I observed this habit first hand. I was instantly attracted to the beautiful covers of Cloud Atlas and The Hare with the Amber Eyes. Upon returning to the US and seeing the American cover to The Hare with the Amber Eyes, I deeply regretted not purchasing it while in the UK. Food doesn’t have to be be attractive to taste great but when it is, it can lead one to salivate.
The British version of the Marriage Plot looks like an airport book…….
Please tell me that’s not two different people named “David” and that he is having a laugh. The article is about different covers of books between US and UK editions, and David takes issue with the omission of two books which, by his own admission, were published in both countries with the same cover?
Reading is fundamental.
I don’t mind the visual design of 1Q84, but as a bookseller, I hate the thin mylar cover. Gets torn and creased all the time, and certainly wasn’t designed for longevity…
Either cover, 1Q84 is a terrible novel.
I love the side-by-side comparisons. I find it so interesting that books have different covers to supposedly appeal to different countries. Do movie posters do the same?
Here, I mostly get the same sense of the book from each cover – perhaps I’d think the story was a shade darker in some cases. Maybe the only exception would be IQ84 as they are so different.
First off, I think it’s certainly an interesting topic. As a bookseller, as well as a mildly (ok wildly) addicted reader/buyer of books, I know the importance of great design in encouraging someone to pick something up for a closer look. Personally, I love the 1Q84 cover design, although I empathize with Emily Pullen’s point about the fragile jacket (which I think is vellum, but whatever). Glancing at my shelves I can list several books that I was first prompted to look at a little more closely just because of the covers. Luminarium by Alex Shakar (although I remembered his great piece here as well when I saw the name) and A Visit From the Goon Squad being two examples. What I do find weird is that sometimes in Canada, we get UK editions, or international (read: not American) trade paperback versions, and sometimes we get the US ones. I’ve bought books in other countries just to get different versions, and once had an author send me a UK version (unprompted, but most appreciated) after I wrote him a fan letter. The bottom line is, in my opinion, that attractive book design leads to more physical book sales. Which, as a bookseller and buyer, makes me happy.
A thousand agreements to Emily and her discontent over 1Q84’s fragile dust cover. Visually, it’s a great design, pretty much the best part of the horrid book, but it’s not practical: at my bookstore we struggled to keep it pristine, a doomed battle from the start as a healthy portion of them arrived to us already bent or wrinkled from shipping. I personally lost at least one sale to this poor design choice–frustrating.
Have you seen the Canadian cover for The Cat’s Table? It’s one of the instances where they chose a different route from both the UK and US co-publishers. It’s got a softer, more historical archive quality to it.
Personally, I can’t stand the US design. The UK’s effort was better, but I’m not sure any one company got it right.
I am not a Chip Kidd fan. I agree his design was too advertorial, too slick. And from a production standpoint, it was a pain in the ass to get the registration right on the case wrap and jacket.
I sometimes buy the UK version of book over the American because of the cover art. The latest cover that bothers my aesthetic sense if for a non-fiction book, “Quiet,” by Susan Cain. I like the white, understated British edition, featuring a small speech bubble that holds the title. The American edition, however, is a schmeary gray background, with the title in red. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
I’m actually reading The Devil All the Time right now, and now that I’ve looked at the cover more closely, I think I’ve finally figured it out—it seems like it’s channeling the opening credits of the TV show True Blood.
In general, I’m not sure British publishers really want to sell books at all. So many of their covers are numbly blank, if not actively screaming “this book is a load of crap” (apologies to Larkin).
Can someone explain why practically all of the American covers have the novel’s title followed by ‘a novel’? Do we really need to be told the novel in front of us is a novel??
Personally I find those black bands on the US versions infuriating – I want to see what’s behind them! But then I’m a Brit…
Always enjoy these comparisons. Reminds me of the time I was a UK bookseller transplanted to Michigan for a few months. At the start I was unable to find any of the books that I knew so well in their US camouflage. By the end of course I’d switched back, and couldn’t find half of the stock at a glance when I got home.
For my tuppence… the Eugenides cover is better in US version (the font wins) but I wish it had the flies. The Murakami US cover is horrible, I’m amazed that it’s Chip Kidd. Maybe it’s better in the flesh. The UK version is fine, but the red brush strokes on the actual cover beneath the dustjacket are really quite nice.
I was disappointed with the writing of both novels however!
The (US) cover of STATE OF WONDER actually kept me from taking it out on at least three separate visits to the library. I finally gave in when it was named to so many lists, incl. the Rooster. The UK one is about equally terrible, though.
I’m not sure anybody mentioned that the wedding band on the American version of The Wedding Plot is a Mobius strip.
Off topic, but are we about done now with the “The So-and-So’s Female Relative” format for novel titles?
This was the first time I have ever read this column and I found it very interesting. As an artist and a reader I have always attached a great deal of importance to the covers of books, and everything else for sale. I tend to be more attracted to book covers that are illustrated by hand. This does not preclude intriguing photographs done with an artist’s eye. I also have come to appreciate fonts as an important design element. It is hard to judge the covers without knowing the contents, as the main purpose of the cover is to convey and enhance the author’s intention (ideally) and to get the book into the hands of the public. I did not agree with all the assessments, but for the most part, and from the perspective of one ignorant of the contents, I did agree with your judgments.
I think in the case of Julian Barnes he is more well known in the UK and most of his book covers here seem to use a similar font. I think this explains the text-based cover on The Sense of an Ending; it’s a branding exercise that works on UK book buyers in a way that it wouldn’t in the US.
I do this meme on my blog. I agree with most of your picks. It amazes me how the US and UK covers always differ. It seems covers appeal differently to readers depending on their residence.
I iive in Tokyo, so in bookstores I often can choose between US, UK, and International version covers! If I do not know anything about the book or author, sometimes I buy purely on jacket design (the Japanese word for this is “jyake-gai” literally “jacket buy” though more used for buying music). For IQ84, I picked Chip Kidd: yes very slick but the layers were great. The Japanese version was very bland, the UK a bit too dark. I did not know the vellum cover would be so troublesome to the bookstores, but I liked how the book theme was continued in the page number placement. Loved the UK covers of The Tiger’s Wife and The Cat’s Table. More next year, please!
Personally, I don’t think the “average” reader gives a fig about the cover being accurate to the book. As long as it’s eye catching and sells sex or violence it’ll sell. I also think that some, if not most, of the covers on all the books compared are bland. I feel you are reading too much into things like a black band suggesting something important being hidden. Then, again, I’m just an “average” reader.
The British version of Julian Barnes’ novel reminds me of Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love cover. Her was blue, but the type is the same and is the right formatting. I like how the British version seems to fade and play tricks with your eyes, however.
Are most of you guys American? I’m English and find the ‘bland’ covers (that so many of you dislike) often more appealing than the American alternatives, which tend to look a bit strange to me. Clearly the people in charge of choosing the covers understand their market well!
The Art of Fielding is an interesting one. Having read the comment re baseball, I understand why you guys like it better, but before reading that, I thought it just looked colourful and oddly loopy, whereas the British cover instantly put me in mind of old-fashioned summers playing cricket. So clearly the cover conveyed the correct feeling adjusted for the relevant market.
Great post. We didn’t agree on most of the covers, but I did enjoy your perspective. Made me take a second…and sometimes a third look in determining what motivates me to pick a particluar book up for a closer look.
I’m from the US and prefer the covers marketed towards us! Except for The Tiger’s Wife and The Cat’s Table…
i recently purchased The Marriage Plot here in Amsterdam, and I love this cover. I was pleasantly surprised that it was different than the covers I had seen previously. I didn’t even realize it was different for a reason, as in, there are different covers for US books & European/UK versions.
I just moved to AMS 6 months ago, so needless to say I am still learning & adjusting to all the differences.
interesting post, good read.
Interesting analysis. Authors, in general, do not have much say about their covers. I was shown covers to all of my novels and nonfiction books, but did not really have veto power. The ultimate call was my publisher’s. In contrast, Kindle can give authors that power. I decided to keep the cover for my “author’s cut” of The Silk Code exactly the same for the US and the UK – because I like the cover so much, and think it has universal appeal. See this discussion about judging books by their covers for more http://karensdifferentcorners.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-part-3-cont-and-5-more-covers/#comment-1040
I will design my own covers, the covers will help me with my fictional novel i am working on. thanks for this post.
A great article and just goes to show the subtle changes that you’ll see from within cultures which share a great many similarities. I work on covers for authors from both sides of the pond ( you can see examples here http://www.jdandj.com ) and have found that when working directly with the authors most of the time their needs and expectations have stayed very close regardless off nationality.