As we’ve done for several years now, we thought it might be fun to compare the U.S. and U.K. book cover designs of this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books contenders. Book cover art is an interesting element of the literary world — sometimes fixated upon, sometimes ignored — but, as readers, we are undoubtedly swayed by the little billboard that is the cover of every book we read. And, while many of us no longer do most of our reading on physical books with physical covers, those same cover images now beckon us from their grids in the various online bookstores. From my days as a bookseller, when import titles would sometimes find their way into our store, I’ve always found it especially interesting that the U.K. and U.S. covers often differ from one another. This would seem to suggest that certain layouts and imagery will better appeal to readers on one side of the Atlantic rather than the other. These differences are especially striking when we look at the covers side by side. The American covers are on the left, and the UK are on the right. Your equally inexpert analysis is encouraged in the comments.
Judging Books by Their Covers 2013: U.S. Vs. U.K.
Uniformity and Blandness: Designing the Body of Work
If you are a popular and prolific enough author, an interesting thing happens to your books, they all begin to look the same. This is the primary outward manifestation of an author as a brand. As a large oeuvre gets rounded out to perhaps a dozen or two titles, the publisher picks a certain design and rereleases all the titles to have that design. This makes a lot of sense. If you are a fan of Prolific Author A and are working your way through his body of work, you’ll soon be on the lookout for the distinctive style his publisher has chosen for his paperbacks. The problem is that all too often, these uniform designs are ugly. My prescription, however, is to scale back on the shared elements and to try to present each book more uniquely so that it feels like as much effort has gone into packaging each individual book as went into to writing it.From my days in the bookstore, I know how important, often subconsciously so, book cover design can be. With that in the mind, there are some very well-known authors whose uniformly designed books are doing them a disservice and deserve an overhaul:The Vintage paperback editions of William Faulkner’s novels have it all: terrible fonts, jarring colors, and strange, bland art. The covers betray none of the complexity of Faulkner’s work and instead promise soft-focus confusion. They feel dated and badly in need of a refresh. Better versions: Check out the prior paperback covers of As I Lay Dying from Penguin and Vintage.Maybe it’s the frames around the Ballantine John Irving paperback covers, but they remind me of hotel art. Irving’s masterful narratives have been reduced to representative but inanimate objects – a nurse’s uniform, a motorcycle – that occupy the safe middle ground that Irving’s books eschew. Better versions: There is a certain dignity to the text-only designs that once graced Irving’s covers.
For a writer as inventive and unique as Kurt Vonnegut, it sure seems like a shame to just slap a big “V” on all his covers and call it a day. Better versions: They may not offer a uniform look, bit I prefer the energy of the old pocket paperback versions of Vonnegut’s novels.
Far better are the Vintage Murakami paperbacks, which evoke some of the most jarring and surreal qualities of Murakami’s fiction. They also maintain a consistent aesthetic and yet they still vary from title to title. Even better versions: The Chip Kidd-designed British hardcover of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle captures the vivid imagery while hinting at the underlying complexity.
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The Audacity of Prose
In one of his essays, the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe stated that “no one be fooled by the fact that we write in English, for we intend to do unheard-of things with it.” That “we” is, in essence, an authoritative oratorical posture that cast him as a representative of a group, a kindred of writers who — either by design or fate — have adopted English as the language of literary composition. With these words, it seems that to Achebe the intention to do “unheard-of” things with language is a primary factor in literary creation. He is right. And this should be the most important factor.
Achebe was, however, not merely speaking about the intention of his contemporaries alone, but also of writers who wrote generations before him. Among them would be, ironically, Joseph Conrad, whose prose he sometimes queried, but who embodied that intention to the extent that he was described by Virginia Woolf as one who “had been gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignificant movement of the pen.” That “we” also includes writers like Vladimir Nabokov of whom John Updike opined: “Nabokov writes prose the way it should be written: ecstatically;” Arundhati Roy; Salman Rushdie; Wole Soyinka; and a host of other writers to whom English was not the only language. The encompassing “we” could also be expanded to include prose stylists whose first language was English like William Faulkner, Shirley Hazzard, Virginia Woolf, William Golding, Ian McEwan, Cormac McCarthy, and all those writers who, in most of their works, float enthusiastically on blasted chariots of prose, and whose literary horses are high on poetic steroids. But these writers, it seems, are the last of a dying breed.
The culture of enforced literary humility, encouraged in many writing workshops and promoted by a rising culture of unobjective literary criticism, is chiefly to blame. It is the melding voice of a crowd that shouts down those who aspire to belong to Achebe’s “we” from their ladder by seeking to enthrone a firm — even regulatory — rule of creative writing. The enthroned style is dished out in the schools under the strict dictum: “Less is more.” Literary critics, on the other hand, do the damage by leveling variations of the accusation of writing “self-conscious (self-important; self-aware…) prose” on writers who attempt to do “unheard-of” things with their prose. The result, by and large, is the crowning of minimalism as the cherished form of writing, and the near rejection of other stylistic considerations. In truth, minimalism has its qualities and suits the works of certain writers like Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, and even, for the most part, Chinua Achebe himself. With it, great writings have been produced, including masterpieces like A Farewell to Arms. But it is its blind adoption in most contemporary novels as the only viable style in the literary universe that must be questioned, if we are to keep the literary culture healthy.
One of the insightful critics still around, Garth Risk Hallberg, describes this phenomenon in his 2012 New York Times Review of A.M Homes’s May We Be Forgiven with these apt observations:
The underlying problem here is style. Homes’s ambitions may have grown in the quarter-century since The Safety of Objects was published, but her default mode of narration remains mired in the minimalism of that era: an uninflected indicative voice that flattens everything it touches. Harry gets some upsetting news: ‘Two days later, the missing girl is found in a garbage bag. Dead. I vomit.’ Harry gets a visitor: ‘Bang. Bang. Bang. A heavy knocking on the door. Tessie barks. The mattress has arrived.’
Hallberg goes on to describe, in the next two paragraphs, the faddist nature of the style:
Style may be, as Truman Capote said, ‘the mirror of an artist’s sensibility,’ but it is also something that develops over time, and in context. When minimalism returned to prominence in the mid-80s, its power was the power to negate. To record yuppie hypocrisies like some sleek new camera was to reveal how scandalous the mundane had become, and how mundane the scandalous. But deadpan cool has long since thinned into a manner. Its reflexive irony is now more or less the house style of late capitalism. (How awesome is that?)
As a non-Western writer, knowing the origin of this fad is comforting. But as Hallberg pointed out, context, not tradition, is what should decide or generate the style of any work of fiction. Paul West noted in his essay, “In Praise of Purple Prose,” written around the heyday of minimalism in 1985, that the “minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy — the human bond with ordinariness.” This rationale, I dare say, misunderstands what art is and what art is meant to do. The essential work of art is to magnify the ordinary, to make that which is banal glorious through artistic exploration. Thus, fiction must be different from reportage; painting from photography. And this difference should be reflected in the language of the work — in its deliberate constructiveness, its measured adornment of thought, and in the arrangement of representative images, so that the fiction about a known world becomes an elevated vision of that world. That is, the language acts to give the “ordinary” the kind of artistic clarity that is the equivalence of special effects in film. While the special effect can be achieved by manipulating various aspects of the novel such as the structure, voice, setting, and others, the language is the most malleable of all of them. All these can hardly be achieved with sparse, strewn-down prose that mimics silence.
The sinuous texture of language, its snakelike meandering, and eloquent intensity is the only suitable way of telling the multi-dimensional and tragic double Bildungsroman of the “egg-twin” protagonists of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Roy’s narrator, invested with unquestionable powers of insight and deliberative lens, is able to maintain a concentrated force of focus on a very specific instance, scene, or place, or action. Hence, the writer — like a witness of such a scene — is able to move with the sweeping prose that will at once appear gorgeous and at the same time be significant and memorable. Since Nabokov’s slightly senile narrator in Lolita posits that “you can always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style,” we are able to understand why Humbert Humbert would describe his lasped sexual preference for Dolores while in bed with her mum in this way: “And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowths of dark decaying forests.” Even though the playfulness of Humbert’s elocution is apparent, one cannot deny aptness — and originality — of the description of Humbert’s response to the pleasure his victim is giving him is.
It is not, however, that the “less is more” nugget is wrong, it is that it makes a blanket pronouncement on any writing that tends to make its language artful as taboo. When sentences must be only a few words long, it becomes increasingly difficult to execute the kind of flowery prose that can establish a piece of writing as art. It also establishes a sandcastle logic, which, if prodded, should crash in the face of even the lightest scrutiny. For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less. What writers must be conscious of, then, is not long sentences, but the control of flowery prose. As with anything in this world, excess is excess, but inadequate is inadequate. A writer must know when the weight of the words used to describe a scene is bearing down on the scene itself. A writer should develop the measuring tape to know when to describe characters’ thoughts in long sentences and when not to. But a writer, above all, should aim to achieve artistry with language which, like the painter, is the only canvas we have. Writers should realize that the novels that are remembered, that become monuments, would in fact be those which err on the side of audacious prose, that occasionally allow excess rather than those which package a story — no matter how affecting — in inadequate prose.
In the same vein, describing a writer’s prose as “self-conscious” isn’t wrong, it is that it misallocates blames to an ailing part of a writer’s work. Self-consciousness is a term that mostly describes the metafictional qualities of a work; it cannot, in effect, describe the use of language. “The hand of the writer” can appear in the framing of a story, in its structure, in the characterization, in the form of experimental works and frame narratives, but it cannot appear in its language. “Self-consciousness” cannot be applied to the use of words on the page, just as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart cannot be accused of self-conscious tune or Yinka Shonibare of self-conscious art. Self-consciousness or pomposity cannot be reflected in a piece of writing, except in its tone, and in fiction, this is even harder to detect. What can be reflected in a piece of writing is excess and lack of control, which can stand in the way of anything at all in life. What critics should be calling out should be pretentious, unsuccessful gloss that lacks measure and control. They should call out images that might be inexact, ineffective, or superfluous. When critics plunge head-on against great writers (Don Delilo, Cormac McCarthy, etc.,) in the manner of B.R. Myers’s agitated fracking masquerading as “criticism,” they only end up scaring other writers from attempting to pen artistic prose. Fear might be what many writers writing today seem to be showing by indulging in the writing of seemingly artless prose. Authorial howls of artful prose as created by James Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Shirley Hazzard, are becoming increasingly rare — sacrificed on the altar of minimalism. Hence, it is becoming more and more difficult to differentiate between literary fiction and the mass market commercial genre pieces, which, more often than not, are couched in plain language.
The gravest danger in conforming to this prevailing norm is that contemporary fiction writers are unknowingly becoming complicit in the ongoing disempowering of language — a phenomenon that the Internet and social media are fueling. Words were once so powerful, so revered, that, as culture critic Sandy Kollick once observed, “to speak the name of something was in fact to invoke its existence, to feel its power as fully present. It was not then as it is now, where a metaphor or a simile merely suggests something else. To identify your totem for a preliterate gatherer-hunters was to be identical with it, and to feel the presence of your clan animal within you.” But no more so. Too many words are being produced in print and visual media that the power of words is diminishing. There are now simply too many newspapers, too many books, too many blogs, too many Twitter accounts for words to maintain their ancestral sacredness. And as writers adjust the language of prose fiction to conform to this era of powerless words, language is disempowered, leading — as Kollick further points out — to the inexorable “emptying out of the human experience,” the very object fiction was meant to preserve in hardbacks and paperbacks.
It is therefore necessary that writers everywhere should see it as their ultimate duty to preserve artfulness of language by couching audacious prose. Our prose should be the Noah’s ark that preserves language in a world that is being apocalyptically flooded with trite and weightless words. “The truest writers,” Derek Walcott said, “are those who see language not as a linguistic process, but as a living element.” By undermining the strongest element of our art, we are becoming unconscious participants in the gradual choking of this “living element,” the life blood of which is language. This we must not do. Rather, we must take a stand in confirmation of the one incontestable truth: that great works of fiction should not only succeed on the strength of their plots or dialogue or character development, but also by the audacity of their prose.
Image Credit: Wikipedia.
I don’t know. The Yellow Birds UK cover does have Emmy winning actor Damian Lewis’ blurb on the front. That made my wife want to read it. I’d like to think that blurb exists solely to blur the line between reality and fiction. It’s the equivalent of having Martin Sheen blurb presidential biographies. Whatever sells more books.
I like the US cover of Arcadia better. The UK version is a little too kiddie objectifying for me.
I like that the UK covers resisit the rediculous sub-title of’ a nove’ on every other book, or maybe they just hide it better.
Anyone else notice that the UK covers of both Fobbit and Billy Lynn tout each book as the “Catch-22” of the Iraq War?
Is the UK cover of Arcadia a Sally Mann photo?
The Billy Lynn covers are the best of this bunch.
ridiculous, that is, I was typing too fast.
I hate all of those except for the UK Homes and the UK Semple.
And I like the US Heti.
The UK FOBBIT cover shamelessly rips off posters for the movies MASH and Full Metal Jacket. I mean _shamelessly_. Not only does that make the cover an automatic loser, but whoever designed it should be fired.
I find most all of these covers to be bland, aesthetically weak, and unattractive. A good cover can sell a book and even add to the overall reading experience by providing a memorable visual reference but this batch, with a few exceptions, screams boredom.
Canned cranberry never looked so tasty … or menacing!
I want the U.S. copy of “Arcadia” just for the cover. I think I would probably look at the cover a lot longer than I would read the book.
The exploding flowers are supposed to be yellow birds, right? On the UK cover? The petals are very feather-like. I like that one.
The US cover for The Orphan Master’s Son is the paperback cover…
Jonathan: You are right! Here is the hardcover: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0812992792/ref=nosim/themillions-20
I still prefer it to the UK cover.
I was amazed to find that the James Herriot series ( ALL THINGS BRIGHT & BEAUTIFUL, etc.) about a Yorkshire veteranarian were covered with Yorkshire landscapes in the USA, but boffoed (animal kicking-ass cartooned) ) in the U.K. .
Quite a cultural diff.!
I so wish the US version of the Round House cover was the same as UK! It is so much better? I mean, what even is that supposed to be/represent on the US cover? Shards of?
What’s with the almost verbatum blurbs from Karl Marlantes and Publisher’s Weekly for Fobbit and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk? From Marlantes for the Fountain novel: “The Catch-22 of the Iraq War.” From Publisher’s Weekly for Fobbit: “The Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.” I haven’t read either of these novels, but this seems just…odd.
CRIMES IN SOUTHERN INDIANA by Frank Bill
US: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780374532888.jpg
UK: http://more2read.com/wp-content/uploads/crimes-in-southern-indiana.jpg
re: Arcadia, compare the UK vs US covers for the original Blind Faith album from 1969. Maybe the UK designers have a Charles Dodson think going?
For me, it’s about half better U.S. and half better U.K. No one country’s cover artists are better than the other’s. Interesting comparisons. Thanks for posting.
Great post. I noticed the same thing as ydm, but wondered if US book covers are for some reason required to specify that they are “a novel” (or “stories” in the case of Dear Life)?
“Judging Books by Their Covers 2013” – enlightening.
The thing about the A.M. Homes covers is that in the UK that tin of cranberry sauce doesn’t carry the same cultural capital. As arresting as the image is, it just would not have struck a chord.
What struck me is just how often the US books have the words ‘a novel’ stuck on after the title. Why?
The Cranberry Sauce makes me want to read that book just to find out why they put cranberry sauce on the cover
Speaking as a UN indie bookseller, I found this comparison fascinating. For years the feeling has been that US covers are much stronger than UK, but that’s no longer the case. It’s as if the UK publishers were so focused on digital for a few years, they dropped the ball on many aspects of the physical book – but no longer. Disagree with the ‘Yellow Birds’ cover – it has real impact in the shop. The US cover of ‘Bring up the Bodies’ is abysmal, a real ‘will this do’ effort – sorry. The UK ‘Alice Monroe’ cover also works well in the bookshop setting strangely. If does look classy on a table jostling with other literary names. Madeline Miller – both poor, but the book sells strongly on word-of-mouth so no harm done. Think the US ‘Arcadia’ cover is better – but other than that and Kevin Powers I think you are spot on…thanks very much for the post…
Of course, that should have been ‘UK’ indie booksellers. I’m sure there are ‘UN’ booksellers, but I am not one of them…apologies…
It’s eye-opening what publishers think readers will and won’t like. When Hodder & Stoughton published the UK version of THE SECRETS OF MARY BOWSER, a novel based on the true story of a former slave who became a Union spy in the Confederate White House during the American Civil War, they put a black woman on the cover. The Norwegian edition also has a black woman on its cover (very different cover). But in the US? Nope.
Major publishers here seem to believe that if you put a black woman on the cover, the book won’t appeal to white readers. (Once a book is already a bestseller, that can change–The Help got black women on the cover on the re-release after the film was out)
I think all three covers have their appeal (judge for yourself http://loisleveen.com/index.php/site/blog-single-entry/judging-a-book-by-its-covers)–but the assumptions behind them reveal what happens when the same story becomes a product for different audiences.
Totally awesome post. I agree with you 90%. I tend to lean towards cerebral covers sometimes too cerebral which squeaks the brain!! Authors have limited say in their design of book covers. As a graphic artist it was a huge challenge for me to let go but ultimately have I trust the publisher’s art and marketing department to know what they are doing and get on with the business of writing. Thanks for sharing this. Cheers!
Overall, I think that the UK covers are more captivating! They are beautiful, with bright colors and details. For the most part when judging a book by it’s cover, I would most likely pick the UK books up off of the shelf over the US ones.
I generally agree with your judgements, except that I find myself not liking photos in cover designs, particularly photographs of people. It gives it too much of a feeling of being a film tie-in or novelization.
Every time I see the US cover of The Round