Another month of books, another month of book covers. We’re past the solstice, and appropriately enough many of these covers feel like summer, with vibrant, unexpected colors, bold gestures, a sense of heat, a sense of play. Enjoy, if possible, from the comfort of your air conditioning.
The gorgeous painting (and related color story) does plenty of work here, but the cover is made even more striking by the tiling/photo strip effect. It’s difficult to mix the digital and the natural, the new and the old, in a way that feels cohesive and functional, but this cover does it very well—creating a sense of danger and uncertainty and drift. I like a good frame-within-a-frame, but more importantly, this is a cover that doesn’t really look like every other cover out there.
It is cool and slick and slightly mysterious, and does the job of making the reader (at least this reader) want to pick up the book. “Because is Morgan Talty’s debut novel, following his bestselling short story collection , we wanted this cover to have a big literary look—bold and unmistakable, leaping off the shelf,” . I think it’s fair to say it worked—and the flowers integrated into the flames is a nice touch.
A big exuberant cover, that literally glitters? You simply have to love it, especially These Days. This is a book in part about excess, and the cover traffics in excess too, except that the balance is exactly right, in this case: not too much, and definitely not too little. Most important.
