James Cartwright caught up with London-based book designer Jamie Keenan to discuss his work and his process. (Related: How do American book covers stack up against their counterparts from across the pond?)
Discussing Book Design with Jamie Keenan
“Poems Are Unimportant”
“Poems are unimportant,” said Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, though Kate Angus and our own Nick Ripatrazone certainly disagree.
Illustrated Goethe
At The Rumpus: illustrations by Harry Clarke for a 1925 edition of Goethe’s Faust.
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FSG’s New Online Literary Periodical
FSG just launched their new online literary periodical, Work in Progress. Check out their debut issue, where you’ll find Jeffrey Eugenides chatting about his latest book with Jonathan Galassi, fiction by Lydia Davis, summer book giveaways and photos from the FSG archives. Look for the clip from an FSG letter introducing Susan Sontag’s first book in 1963: “It is difficult, as you know, to create interest in new writers.”
Use It Or Lose It
At least two people were not pleased with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine. In a letter to the New York Observer (and an expanded post on Google+), Susannah McCormick – daughter of renowned music historian Robert “Mack” McCormick – alleges that Sullivan and his research assistant “glibly” stole her father’s research in an act of “quasi theft.” In his response, Sullivan asserts that, “by hiding L. V. Thomas’s voice, by refusing for over half a century to credit or even so much as name the two singers who created those recordings while they or their contemporaries were alive, Mack McCormick committed a theft—through negligence or writer’s block or whatever reasons of his own—far graver than my citation of interviews L.V. granted him decades ago.”
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Brooklyn Boys II
…meanwhile, quondam neighbor Jonathan Lethem has packed up for California (to take over the Pomona College position last held by David Foster Wallace). Just in time for Halloween, he raps with New York Magazine about the move…and about his new, book-length treatment of John Carpenter‘s They Live.