NEW HARUKI MURAKAMI STORY
I really liked this one.
I still haven’t read his latest book, Kafka on the Shore. I was working at Chapters when it came out, and I was stoked about it. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is one of my favorite books ever, (and which seems wildly underappreciated compared to Wild Sheep Chase or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), and I’ve liked everything else he’s written. But then when it arrived, the cover was UGLY. I don’t know why I have such a negative reaction to it, but that image definitely repels me. I even took the dust jacket off to check out the actual book, but the hardcover was ugly too, somehow. It wasn’t that the creepy cover made me not want to read it, but shelling out $35 for the hardcover… it’s a package deal. The last new hardcover I bought was David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion, which was, of course, crushingly brilliant and also had a wonderful cover.
Speaking of great looking books, I was pleased to find John Dewey’s Art As Experience at the second-hand bookstore across the street; the cover, designed by Robert Sullivan, is suberb.
I prefer designs which are simple and use colour sparingly and honour the text. Here’s another one of my favorites:
It doesn’t fuck around, you know?
My favorite example of bad cover art I’ve seen lately is from a paperback edition of What Philosophers Think, an anthology contemporary philosophy.
I don’t think I’m being excessively Freudian when I observe that this…
…looks an awful lot a girl with a dildo up her ass.