I\u2019m named Eleanor because I was born a week after Eleanor Roosevelt came to Kansas City to campaign for her husband. At the time, my parents were living in Rolla, Missouri, and my mother said that even if not for my imminent birth, she wouldn\u2019t have made the trip across half the state to wait with the crowd at the airport. But the next day, Rolla\u2019s newspaper used a third of its front page to print a picture of Mrs. Roosevelt smiling in front of the little TWA airplane that she apparently wasn\u2019t terrified to ride around in. My mother admired her courage.<\/p>\n
My father liked the name Eleanor, but worried it would work against me, as many people in our part of Missouri had strong feelings about the Roosevelts, and not all those feelings were good. He suggested they call me Nora for short, and my mother was fine with that.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know until I met Leonard that the name Eleanor comes from the name Helen, which in Greek means \u201cshining light.\u201d Even at seventeen, Leonard had that kind of information just rolling around in his head. But I doubt my mother ever knew what my name means in Greek. She would have been pleased to learn it, as she loved sunlight. More than most people do, I mean. When she came in to wake us, before she even kissed our foreheads, it was always shades up, curtains back. She hated the long nights of winter. Every July, we spent a weekend at the Lake of the Ozarks, and once, while my father was fishing, she had me and my brother climb a slope with her so she could take a picture of the water at sunset. Back home, when she got the film developed, she was disappointed. The sparkle couldn\u2019t be captured in black and white.<\/p>\n
Another thing I remember about her is that she didn\u2019t tolerate lies. She regularly reminded my brother and me that liars died twice in the Lake of Fire, and he who breathed out lies would perish. And to her, Bobby and I both understood, a lie was a lie was a lie. It didn\u2019t matter if you were Hitler saying he only wanted peace (a piece of Poland, the joke went, a piece of France . . .) or the woman who said she\u2019d already paid the bill for her laundry when both she and my mother knew she hadn\u2019t. Or, it should be said, if you were a particular daughter, tempted to deceive when asked why the bowl containing that week\u2019s sugar ration didn\u2019t seem as full as it should be.<\/p>\n
Because I admired my mother and loved her, and because I didn\u2019t want to be punished by God, and because I most certainly didn\u2019t want to have anything in common with Hitler, I tried hard not to lie to anyone. About anything. If a friend at school asked me if I liked her new dress and I didn\u2019t, I\u2019d pretend I\u2019d forgotten something and had to run back to get it. Or I\u2019d change the subject to something of hers I did like, maybe a barrette or her socks. But if pressed, I\u2019d tell the truth.<\/p>\n
In sixth grade, however, I told a blatant lie, and though I obviously didn\u2019t perish, I still believe what followed altered the course of my life.<\/p>\n
My teacher that year was a Mr. Pile, and from the first day of class, I loathed him. He was nice enough to me, as I was quick, studious, and a girl. But he called Tom Bigby, who was the smallest in our class, \u201cMr. Littleby,\u201d and he kept doing it long after even the worst of us stopped laughing. Ronald Bell, wall-eyed and slow, was unimaginatively called \u201cMr. Fish.\u201d Peter Schultz sounded as Missourian as the rest of us, but Mr. Pile would only address him as \u201cHerr Schultz,\u201d in the thickest of German accents, and this at a time when no American wanted to be thought of as German.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pile lectured at us from behind a podium, and he\u2019d made a little sign for this podium that said mr. pile in spread-out letters, as if he wanted to spell it for us slowly: m r. p i l e. I\u2019d often stare at this sign and think about what it should say, or rather, what it could say. He\u2019d used his fountain pen to make the letters, so nothing could be erased from the sign, only added.<\/p>\n
One morning when we were out at recess, I fell off the monkey bars\u2014it was winter, and when the temperature dipped below a certain degree, girls were allowed to wear pants under their skirts, so those were big monkey-bar days for us. I wasn\u2019t hurt when I fell, but I muddied the hem of my skirt, and I asked Mr. Pile if I could please go in and rinse off the mud. He gave me permission, and I went in. Some of the younger grades were on a different schedule, and I remember that there were other girls in the washroom, and other students and teachers in the hall. By the time I got the mud out, the bell had rung and the hall was quiet again, though my class had ten more minutes of recess.<\/p>\n
I realized I had time to do something I very much wanted to do. Throughout my life, I\u2019ve seized such opportunities. Sometimes this seizing has very much worked to my advantage. Sometimes it has not.<\/p>\n
I ducked into our classroom and closed the door behind me. I found Mr. Pile\u2019s fountain pen in his top desk drawer. With a few strokes, I changed the sign to read m r. r u d e, then capped the pen and returned it. When I went back outside, I showed Mr. Pile I\u2019d gotten out the mud, and thanked him for letting me go in.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re quite welcome, Miss Nora. You did a good job getting that stain out.\u201d<\/p>\n
I smiled back, not feeling bad one bit. I hadn\u2019t lied. I\u2019d made the sign on the podium more honest.<\/p>\n
Once we were back at our desks, it didn\u2019t take long for my classmates to start smiling and looking at one another. But Mr. Pile, standing behind the podium, had no idea what was so funny. I must say, I was pleased to witness how scared he looked, realizing he was being laughed at. Shoe, meet your new foot. The good time went on until Wilma Cooper raised her hand. Wilma believed that because of her faith in Jesus, she had to be nice to everyone, and when Mr. Pile called on her, she sorrowfully pointed to the sign. He came around to look for himself. By then, no one was laughing. We could hear him breathing through his teeth.<\/p>\n
When he turned to face us, he raised one finger, and it trembled.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhoever did this,\u201d he said, \u201cwill be discovered.\u201d<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t worried. Everyone in our class had been outside with him, except, briefly, for me. And Mr. Pile only knew me as a good girl, well-mannered and compliant, with no reason to dislike him. I have a picture of myself from that era, and I look irritating and prim\u2014my mother used to wrap my hair in rags Sunday nights so I\u2019d have curls like Shirley Temple through the week. In this picture I\u2019m smiling, resting my chin on folded hands, and I have an enormous bow in my hair that looks gray in the picture, though I remember the bow was yellow. I believe I wore that yellow bow in my hair the day I changed Mr. Pile\u2019s sign.<\/p>\n
He was still breathing like a bull when he gave us a page of math problems and told us to work quietly at our desks. He went out into the hall, and though he left the door open, some of the boys started to turn around and whisper to one another, trying to guess who might have done it. No one thought of me. Mary Pank turned around, waited for me to look up, then whispered, \u201cMr. Rude!\u201d I smiled just enough to show I agreed it was funny, then went back to work.<\/p>\n
Good thing, because Mr. Pile came back in quickly, and when I looked up, he was staring right at me.<\/p>\n
\u201cMiss Chesnow,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Terror bloomed, unhelpful. I put my pencil down. \u201cSir?\u201d<\/p>\n
He took a step toward my desk, and then another. Behind me, the radiator hissed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you came inside during recess, did you see anyone coming or going from this room?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo sir,\u201d I said. It was true. I hadn\u2019t seen myself. But I was aware of my classmates watching, and of their fear on my behalf. Mr. Pile seemed mostly bewildered, as if he\u2019d set something down and turned around, then turned back to find the thing missing.<\/p>\n
\u201cMiss Chesnow.\u201d A vein on his forehead bulged. \u201cI\u2019m going to ask you one last time. Do you know who altered the sign?\u201d<\/p>\n
Now the choice was clear. I would confess, or I would lie. For just a moment, I considered revealing myself. It was like standing at the edge of a dock, your body already leaning forward, and deciding almost too late not to jump.<\/p>\n
I recently read a book by C. S. Lewis in which he says that you don\u2019t really know what you believe until the truth of it becomes a matter of life and death. It\u2019s one thing to have faith that a rope is strong when it\u2019s coiled in a box. But would you dangle from that rope over a precipice? In those moments that Mr. Pile stared down at me, waiting for an answer, I was more afraid than I\u2019d ever been in my life. And C. S. Lewis was exactly right. I discovered that I didn\u2019t truly believe my mother\u2019s warnings of eternal punishment. Or rather, I was willing to bet against them in the face of Mr. Pile\u2019s certain, and imminent, wrath.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo <\/em>sir.\u201d I managed to sound indignant. Unpracticed as I was, fear pushed me to excel.<\/p>\n \u201cI see.\u201d Shame filled his eyes. \u201cForgive me.\u201d<\/p>\n My heartbeat steadied. I nodded once, an insulted but merciful queen. Mr. Pile retreated from my desk, dabbed at his forehead with his handkerchief, and with a shaky voice, resumed class.<\/p>\n What C. S. Lewis didn\u2019t say: After the danger passes, you might go back to not knowing what you believe and start to worry that you chose wrong.<\/p>\n I spent the rest of the day in a silent panic. At lunch, both Mary and Wilma expressed outrage that I\u2019d been unfairly accused. I said nothing, and felt even worse. When school got out, I waited for my brother at my usual spot, watching fat snowflakes fall from the pearly sky, their beauty no consolation.<\/p>\n When I got home, my mother asked me about my day. I said my day was fine. Because why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. She looked up from her ironing, wincing as if in sudden pain. Or that\u2019s how I remember that moment. She\u2019d always told me she could tell when someone was lying, and so I held my breath and waited. The look of pain left her face. She smiled, reached out to muss my hair, and said if I changed my clothes and wore my warm hat, I could go out and play.<\/p>\n That night, I was not visited by demons, and I woke to find, to my surprise, that I had not perished in my sleep.<\/p>\n When I returned to school on Monday, I noticed that Mr. Pile didn\u2019t call Tom or Ronald or Peter any names but their own. He didn\u2019t call on them at all\u2014his pride was too great for that. But at least some decent part of him realized he shouldn\u2019t be dishing out what he so clearly couldn\u2019t take.<\/p>\n And so my relief turned to jubilance. I didn\u2019t care that no one knew I was the one who\u2019d taught the teacher a lesson. Everyone thought Diana Prince was a regular army nurse, but she was secretly Wonder Woman, using her jet and lasso and superpowers to fight evil, near and far. I had no magic lasso, and no invisible jet, but I could lie with eyes of steel, and that felt like a superpower. Over the next few days, I planned an entire career of secretly using this power to take down other villains.<\/p>\n On Friday, the principal showed up outside Mr. Pile\u2019s door. He said my name and told me I should gather my things. I could barely strap my books because my hands were shaking, though Mr. Pile himself only seemed surprised. Out in the hallway, the principal touched my shoulder and spoke to me gently, saying my father was in his office. And I knew. My father was a machinist at a metals plant. He went to work even when he was sick. If I was in trouble, no matter how serious, my mother would have been the one to come. I broke into a run, ignoring the principal calling after me. Some of us are like that with what scares us. If we know it\u2019s coming, we rush to it. The dread is worse than the thing itself.<\/p>\n When the secretary saw me in the doorway, she looked at me with pity, then glanced at a door a few feet from her desk. I moved past her, opened that door, and there was my father, a giant in a chair made for a child, the laces of one of his boots undone. He\u2019d been crying. And just that, seeing tearstains on my father\u2019s cheeks, was like seeing water run uphill. I\u2019d entered a new world, with different rules.<\/p>\n \u201cOh honey,\u201d he said, and held out his arms.<\/p>\n My mother had collapsed while she was hanging clothes in our backyard. I learned later that Mrs. Ritchie next door saw her fall, and she\u2019d had to run and get her step stool so she could get over the fence and try to help. By the time she did, my mother was already dead. An aneurysm, my father said, and I could tell the word was unfamiliar to him as well. But he explained as best he could, putting a fist by his left ear, then shooting out his oil-stained fingers. A burst vessel in her brain. He couldn\u2019t understand it. She was the best person he knew, my mother. And there was no family history of any such thing. She was young and healthy. It made no sense, he said, gasping through sobs, his shoulders heaving. No sense at all.<\/p>\n Of course, all of it made sense to me.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n If my father had asked me directly why she died, I would have told him the truth, even if he hated me for it. I sincerely believed my lie had killed her, and that if I lied again, my father or Bobby might be taken as well. But he didn\u2019t ask me why she died, and I didn\u2019t volunteer the information. My whole life, my father had brightened at the sight of me, laughed at my jokes, and advised my brother, three years younger, to follow my example. I\u2019d grown up basking in the warmth of his esteem, and I couldn\u2019t bear the thought of losing it. So I let him think that my misery was like his, coming only from grief.<\/p>\n My shame was so great that I told no one of my guilt, though for months it was always with me, an itch under my sweater, burning but unseen.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n From <\/em>Sunlight Finds You<\/a> by Laura Moriarty<\/em>. Used with permission of the publisher, Riverhead Books. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Laura Moriarty.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m named Eleanor because I was born a week after Eleanor Roosevelt came to Kansas City to campaign for her husband. At the time, my parents were living in Rolla, Missouri, and my mother said that even if not for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":274787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[57696,6552,111412],"class_list":["post-274786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-laura-moriarty","tag-riverhead-books","tag-sunlight-finds-you","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19u2","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/9781594487170.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275460,"date":"2026-08-08T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T10:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275460"},"modified":"2026-08-07T12:20:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T16:20:47","slug":"lit-hub-weekly-august-3-7-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-weekly-august-3-7-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Weekly: August 3 – 7, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1965, Shirley Jackson dies. <\/span><\/span>\n Also on Lit Hub:<\/p>\n Ten new children\u2019s books<\/a> \u2022 Your August poetry <\/a>TBR \u2022 This week in literary history, Shakespeare\u2019s Macbeth<\/i> is (probably) performed for the first time<\/a> \u2022 August\u2019s best new sci-fi and fantasy books<\/a> \u2022 Books to shape your Tudor obsession<\/a> \u2022 The Chilean student activists<\/a> fighting for public education \u2022 Books that complicate the marriage plot<\/a> \u2022 Maybe you just need a writing date with Rumpelstiltskin<\/a> \u2022 The enduring appeal of the canine narrator<\/a> \u2022 Ten great nonfiction titles<\/a> to read this August \u2022 How Margr\u00e9t Ann Thors honors her grandmother, daughter, and Icelandic heritage in her debut novel<\/a> \u2022 The hidden violence in<\/a> art and photography \u2022 How ideas of race and place influenced Harry Belafonte\u2019s music<\/a> \u2022 Finding unexpected inspiration while writing from Ted Hughes\u2019s childhood home<\/a> \u2022 This week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction<\/a> and nonfiction<\/a> \u2022 5 book reviews<\/a> you need to read this week \u2022 Why writing a novel and hiking up a mountain are basically the same thing<\/a> \u2022 Different forms of family and<\/a> translating Someone to Cook For<\/i> \u2022 The history of book cover trends<\/a> \u2022 Community and belonging in New York\u2019s Black punk scene<\/a> \u2022 On loving the performance<\/a> of professional wrestling \u2022 The best reviewed books<\/a> of the week<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Carly Mattox considers Jennette McCurdy\u2019s Half His Age and reckons with the long literary history of age gap relationships. | Lit Hub Memoir Why mothers and their babies are the ultimate fl\u00e2neurs, even if \u201cthere aren\u2019t a lot of mother-fl\u00e2neurs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":275463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19EU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/shirleyjackson1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275439,"date":"2026-08-07T06:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275439"},"modified":"2026-08-06T16:19:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T20:19:20","slug":"lit-hub-daily-august-7-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-daily-august-7-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Daily: August 7, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1957, Italo Calvino\u2019s letter of resignation from the Italian Communist Party is published in L\u2019Unita<\/em>. <\/span>\n Should you judge a book by its cover? Probably! Ed Simon looks at the history of book cover trends. | Lit Hub Design James Spooner remembers finding community and belonging in New York’s Black punk scene. | Lit Hub Music<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":275440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[45236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lit-hub-daily"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ez","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/italocalvinobike.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275162,"date":"2026-08-07T05:10:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T09:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275162"},"modified":"2026-08-07T07:28:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T11:28:28","slug":"its-ok-to-judge-a-book-by-its-cover-its-impossible-not-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/its-ok-to-judge-a-book-by-its-cover-its-impossible-not-to\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Ok to Judge a Book By Its Cover (It\u2019s Impossible Not To)"},"content":{"rendered":" For a coterie of dandyish readers during the Victorian Mauve Nineties, The Yellow Book <\/i>provided something novel\u2014book cover designs. When the literary quarterly released its first volume in the spring of 1894 it was with a high-quality cloth-bound cover colored a midnight yellow as if by the flickering of a gas lamp, with a stark black caricature of a seventeenth-century bouffanted and beauty-marked lady in a carnival mask laughing while an androgynous second stands behind her. \u201cIf I am not grotesque,\u201d said the designer Aubrey Beardsley, \u201cI am nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n Inspired by the poster illustrators of Paris, most infamously Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley, whose face his friend Oscar Wilde described as shaped \u201clike a hatchet\u201d and who was known to visit the publishers in a riffled morning coat with yellow gloves, envisioned the pedestrian book cover, an object largely of pure utility, as rather an occasion for beauty.<\/p>\n Reading a book begins before a book is ever read, and of course the cover images are the most integral part of that process.<\/p>\n Before Beardsley, the cover was a concern of binders; after, it was the domain of artists. During the middle-ages, vellum was encased in intricately carved wooden boards, often with clasps to prevent humidity from curling its pages; by the era of print, books could be bound in leather or stiff cardboard, sometimes with a frontispiece woodcut, but The Yellow Book\u2014<\/i>deriving its name from the color by which illicit French novels signified their contents\u2014elevated the modest cover to a new level of aesthetic import. In this case maybe even more significant than literature, for despite anthologizing Henry James and W.B. Yeats, the quarterly is best remembered for Beardsley\u2019s covers over its first four issues (he was fired and then died of tuberculosis). In forever changing the nature of the book, Beardsley\u2019s first edition cost five shillings, and the month was accidentally printed as \u201cAprtl.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAdvertisement is an absolute necessity of modern life,\u201d Beardsley wrote in an 1894 essay for The New Review<\/i>. That is the ostensible purpose of a cover, to promote its wares, but also to more mysteriously convey what reading an individual book might feel <\/i>like. Perhaps that\u2019s why digital books have never appealed to me. What a book feels <\/i>like so often depends on the literal embodied feel <\/i>of the book, from the smooth glossiness of a dust-jacketed hardback to the gentle matte covers of a paperback, the tactile raggedness of paper cut deckle edge or the oily sheen of velvet lamination, which is apt to emblazon every fingerprint that touches it. New Critical theorizing be damned, to read the words on the page only to ignore the page itself can feel like not having read at all. Reading a book begins before a book is ever read, and of course the cover images are the most integral part of that process.<\/p>\n Of the books on my (metaphorical) night stand which I\u2019m currently reading through, there is critic Jerry Saltz\u2019s Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night, <\/i>pundit John Ganz\u2019s When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, <\/i>and editor Emily Eakin\u2019s The Frenchman: Or, My Life in Theory. <\/i>These covers were respectively created by graphic designer Ben Denzer, freelance artist Patrice Sheridan (after an illustration by Thomas Colligan), and Penguin Associate Art Director Amanda Dewey.<\/p>\n Denzer\u2019s cover arranges the title and author name in warm reds, pinks, and purples overlaid onto simple rectangles, recalling the abstraction of a Magritte or a Rothko painting; the cover which Sheridan made recalls designs from slightly before the time period which Ganz writes about, a minimalist clock in red and blue with stars instead of numbers that seems to spill out of the confines of the timepiece, the title reproduced in the colors of the American flag; Dewey\u2019s puckish and subversive cover features the illustration of a woman in a Gallic black turtleneck with a Gauloises between two fingers, but with the outline of her entire head missing, as if a collagist had excised it from a magazine before posting it beneath the pink letters of the title, which purposefully evoke the soft aesthetic of chick-lit repurposed for a nearly 500-page book about Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan. Spiritual descendants of Beardsley all.<\/p>\n \u201cI determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty\u201d wrote William Morris, a crucial member of the British Arts and Crafts Movement which so influenced Beardsley, in his 1896 novel The Well at the World\u2019s End. <\/i>As a dedicated acolyte, especially as that movement began to develop into the Art Nouveau style with all of its tall palm fronds and slender women, stylized flowers and sleek surfaces, Beardsley understood the cover as a conduit for beauty as much as commercialism. Aesthetes though the Arts and Crafts movement may have been, a kind of democratic ethos inspired the movement (Wilde himself, associated with many of them, was a socialist after all). Figures like Morris (and Beardsley) championed a liberation of the pleasing, an egalitarian dissemination of the aesthetic. Elitists in standards, but not in access. Forks and spoons, tables and chairs, tea-pots and entire houses\u2014books too\u2014were all to be designed towards both practicality and beauty.<\/p>\n Not only is \u201cnever judge a book by its cover\u201d a clich\u00e9, it is one that lacks seriousness. To pretend that a cover is merely incidental is to ignore how much of literature is extraliterary, as if consciousness can be easily disentangled from the body. \u201cMore than a boundary or a sealed border,\u201d writes theorist Gerard Gennett in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, <\/i>elements such as book covers are a \u201cthreshold.\u201d Genett\u2019s subject includes all of the \u201cother stuff\u201d in a book: dedications and acknowledgements, epigraphs and tables-of-contents, and, of course, covers. According to Genett, the proper interpretation of a work can\u2019t ignore this seemingly incidental material, which is crucial to a book as a book.<\/p>\n A history of literature could be written by analyzing book cover trends.<\/p>\n So iconic are some cover designs that even decades later they\u2019re inextricable from how we interpret a book. From the golden age of covers, consider Shirley Smith\u2019s iconic design for Harper Lee\u2019s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird, <\/i>with a green-leafed, angular brown tree framed by a blood red background; Paul Bacon\u2019s jumping red figure bathed in blue from Joseph Heller\u2019s 1961 Catch-22; <\/i>S. Neil Fujita\u2019s instantly memorable cover to Mario Puzo\u2019s 1966 The Godfather <\/i>with a puppet-master\u2019s hand clutching a control bar that looks, ominously, like a cross. Smith\u2019s cover, with its slightly threatening tree that implies so much about America\u2019s racial history, especially in the south where Lee\u2019s novel is set, is not incidental to the book\u2019s meaning, just as Fujita\u2019s impersonal, abstracted, and unseen hand meddling in affairs Machiavellian tells readers what to expect from the Corleone family.<\/p>\n Covers can affirm ideological commitments, whether the social realism of Elmer Hader\u2019s 1939 cover to John Steinbeck\u2019s The Grapes of Wrath <\/i>where the Joads, barefoot and in dirty overalls, look over the blasted California hillside or Nick Gaetano\u2019s 25th-anniversary edition in 1982 of Ayn Rand\u2019s Atlas Shrugged <\/i>with its hard-bodied, futurist titan gleaming in monetary gold. Big Brother may always be watching in George Orwell\u2019s Nineteen Eighty-Four, <\/i>but how<\/i> he is watching depends on the cover art, from the simple cursive and green background of the first edition, through the amazingly pulpy 1950 Signet Classics edition in the United States that served to defang much of the dystopian allegory in favor of the vampy tropes of trash literature, and the ever-popular omnipresent eye that\u2019s featured on a multitude of versions, including one from Mariner Books for the 75th anniversary. A 2013 Penguin Classics edition of Orwell\u2019s classic opted to redact the title and author in thick, black lines, which depending on your personal inclination is either appropriately terrifying or too precious by half (future versions, if available, would do well just to feature a photograph of a Flock camera).<\/p>\n A history of literature could be written by analyzing book cover trends. There was the libertine belle epoque, influenced by Beardsley\u2019s example, where designers like Hugh Thompson, Margaret Armstrong, and Sarah Wyman Whitman decorated borders in delicate flowers and peacock feathers; the revolutionary avant-garde of the Russian Constructivists who combined geometrical shapes and photomontages as with Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova; the lurid pulp of the United States\u2019 post-war years, where Robert McGinnis or Norman Saunders specialized in pin-up worthy dames, hard-boiled detectives, and alien spaceships.<\/p>\n Multiple fashions have come and gone in the last decade, though the cover designer\u2019s art still endures in an era of cheap artificial intelligence. Recently there has been a mania for classical paintings juxtaposed with vaguely punkish fonts, such as with Darren Haggar\u2019s design for Ottessa Moshfegh\u2019s 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation, <\/i>the simple mid-century elegance of Lynn Buckley\u2019s designs for both Meg Wolitzer\u2019s 2013 The Interestings <\/i>and Geraldine Brooks\u2019 2022 Horse, <\/i>and the punkish, pop art post-modernism of Rachel Wiley seen in her Western-themed feminist collage for Anna North\u2019s 2021 Outlawed <\/i>(another face that\u2019s been disappeared here, save for a pair of red lips).\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n In a digital world, analog covers still mean something, whether the Zen simplicity of Fitzcarraldo Edition\u2019s blue-and-white covers (that have supplanted the long-ago supplanted Penguin Classics among the same sorts of readers) or the modernist uniformity of the New York Review of Books Classics. Through it all, the designer designs. Chip Kidd may not be as famous as Michael Crichton or Cormac McCarthy, but his covers for Jurassic Park <\/i>and The Road <\/i>are instantly recognizable; Junot Diaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, <\/i>but it was Rodrigo Corral\u2019s evocative and ethereal cover that many people saw before they read a single word. Cover design reminds us how much of the literary art is the sole purview of the author, but rather that it\u2019s intensely collaborative. With apologies to Shelley, maybe designers are the unacknowledged poets of the world.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been fortunate regarding covers, where so much is personally invested in being able to hold an author copy of my book for the first time, in knowing that this is the cover that will be associated with my words. David Wilson\u2019s abstract design for my 2021 An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, <\/i>where the black-and-gold (obviously) rendering of the abstracted three rivers looked like the gold leaf in the Japanese art kintsugi <\/i>(whereby broken pottery is mended to look more beautiful than it did before), is a large part of why I think I\u2019m still signing new copies of that book today. Beste M. Do\u011fan\u2019s design for my 2024 Devil\u2019s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, <\/i>which featured gothic font arrayed around a collage of modern color and a Renaissance woodcut, reminded me so much of my favorite 1970s horror covers that my pulse quickened when my editor first sent me the JPEG. Writers can be proprietary creatures, but it would be disingenuous for me not to acknowledge that my books are, in part, also our books.<\/p>\n After all, would F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby <\/i>read quite the same without Francis Cugat\u2019s cover, now more than a century old, depicting Daisy Buchanan\u2019s otherworldly face rising up from the lights of a Long Island amusement park, her earing sparking in the blue sky like a fire cracker? Can you imagine J.D. Salinger\u2019s The Catcher in the Rye <\/i>totally divorced from E. Michael Mitchell\u2019s 1951 cover with that urbane and sophisticated drawing in red of the horse on a Central Park carousel, sketches of pre-war Upper West Side apartment high rises jotted down below? And what of the resplendent 1894 illustration by Hugh Thomson, associate of Beardsley, for Jane Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice, <\/i>with a peacock standing atop an urn, every tender resplendent feather of the bird inching out towards the blue border of the novel, a picture so achingly beautiful that 132 years later you can still find on the cover of that book today?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a coterie of dandyish readers during the Victorian Mauve Nineties, The Yellow Book provided something novel\u2014book cover designs. When the literary quarterly released its first volume in the spring of 1894 it was with a high-quality cloth-bound cover colored<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":667,"featured_media":275163,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,11,43101,43070,43092],"tags":[195,111549,111548,1149,12801,111547,7713],"class_list":["post-275162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-fullwidth-slider","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-newsandculture","tag-book-covers","tag-book-trends","tag-cover-trends","tag-craft","tag-ed-simon","tag-history-of-book-covers","tag-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19A6","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/catch-22-cover.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/667"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275080,"date":"2026-08-07T05:09:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T09:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275080"},"modified":"2026-08-02T21:47:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T01:47:54","slug":"finding-my-place-in-nycs-black-punk-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/finding-my-place-in-nycs-black-punk-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding My Place in NYC\u2019s Black Punk Scene"},"content":{"rendered":" Back in 1991, on the corner of Bleecker and Broadway, under the VG restaurant, was Pool Bar, a short-lived dive that also served as an unofficial, all-ages venue. A few weeks after school started, a line of kids, all under twenty-two but most still in high school, stood with a 3×5 lime-green flyer in hand. Each with their own variation on shaved or colored hair, they inched one by one down the black metal staircase, into the basement bar.<\/p>\n A tall Black guy who was equal parts Howard Stern and Rick James stood at the entrance, eliciting authority with a clipboard and rubber stamp. On the way downstairs, I caught David out of the corner of my eye. Hidden from the doorman\u2019s view, he licked the top of his hand, then firmly pressed it against a friend\u2019s. Their eager eyes lit up upon confirmation of success: one freshly stamped smudge became two, thus evading the five-dollar cover.<\/p>\n They obviously didn\u2019t think much of Jheri Curl Joey Ramone and his authority. The fact that each tally mark was a dollar in the band\u2019s pocket, and that sneaking in was essentially stealing money from them, also didn\u2019t faze us. At the time, I had no qualms about trying to squeeze another transfer off the top of David\u2019s hand too but…<\/p>\n \u201cFive bucks; who are you here to see?\u201d Black Frankenstein, Superfly Snuka droned, without looking up from his clipboard. With a packed house, he was obviously on autopilot.<\/p>\n \u201cBushmon,\u201d I responded with a totally uncool chipper tone, \u201cRyan said I was on his list?\u201d My voice might have cracked during that last part.<\/p>\n Only a few months into living in New York, I was still trying to find my footing in the local punk community.<\/p>\n This wasn\u2019t the first time Black punks had existed, but it was the first time I felt that presence in my own body, in my own moment. Being Black, in that room, felt like an asset.<\/p>\n This \u201cbeing on the list\u201d thing was a big deal to me. This show wasn\u2019t like Stigmata at the Pyramid. The list wasn\u2019t unlimited, yet Ryan offered me one of the spots. Being on the list made me feel like my presence mattered. I didn\u2019t happen upon the flyer; I wasn\u2019t just any spectator; I was invited. Despite the jaded energy from the doorman, someone onstage wanted me inside.<\/p>\n The doorman lifted a sheet of paper covered in tally marks and checked for my name. I could feel my heart racing against my sternum. What if he forgot? I mean, we just became friends!<\/p>\n I began to panic.<\/p>\n \u201cHe probably comped a girl he\u2019s into instead,\u201d I thought.<\/p>\n I looked back up at David and his friend, wondering if it was too late for me to get one of those transfers.<\/p>\n \u201cI see it,\u201d he said lifelessly as he scratched out my name, \u201cRazzle.\u201d<\/p>\n He pushed the gooey stamp on the back of my hand, leaving behind a smear of purple ink.<\/p>\n As I stepped into the tiny venue, I could hear the Ebony Unskinny Bop behind me robotically continuing, \u201cFive bucks; who are you here to see?\u201d<\/p>\n If I had to guess, Pool Bar was established at the time to serve the runoff of washed-up rockers who wanted to escape the crowds of the once legendary, now tourist-packed venues a few blocks down on Bleecker Street, like the Bitter End and Cafe Wha?, where Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin had once played, but that now hosted bands who, at best, covered those acts.<\/p>\n\n
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