Lolita has been, for decades, a great inspiration to cover designers, and all those great covers inspired architect John Bertram to hold his own cover design contest to see who could best re-imagine Nabokov’s classic. The resulting competition has now inspired a book, coming in August, with a cover by designers Sulki & Min that references a letter Nabokov sent to his American publisher, Walter J. Minton of Putnam, in April 1959 about the cover design for Lolita. “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.” More: An interview with Bertram.
Lolita, Cover Girl
New Marilynne Robinson On the Way
This fall, Marilynne Robinson will mark her return to a fictional plains town in Iowa with the publication of Lila, the third novel in her Gilead series. Expect the novel to be featured in our forthcoming Great Book Preview, but if you can’t wait until then, you’ve got to check out FSG’s exclusive excerpt from the book.
Rocker Lit
First there was Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. Now he is writing a children’s book, complete with illustrations by his daughter. Gus & Me tells the story of Richards’s bond with his grandfather, which is slightly more normal than snorting his dad’s ashes.
Carla F. Cohen
Carla F. Cohen, co-owner and founder of legendary Washington, D.C. bookstore Politics & Prose, died this morning.
at the utmost limits of writing itself
Christian Bök wonders about the future of conceptual poetry:”How do we write poems in a world where a spambot, like @horse_ebooks, gets to write all the great lines…?”