The 14 Best Book Covers of September
Texture, Text, and Turntables
Another month of books, another month of book covers. This month, I noticed a lot of play with both text and texture, fresh collage forms, and two very different ways to use a record as inspiration. Here are my favorites from September:
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Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!; cover design by Luísa Dias (Astra House, September 2)
The tooth! (The blood!)
Marisa Silver, At Last; cover design by Luísa Dias (Simon & Schuster, September 2)
I’m a sucker for halftone, but the juxtaposition of the two images—one dark, one light—under the Big Book Text is also working really well here.
Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitken, The Wax Child; cover design by Paul Sahre (New Directions, September 2)
Sometimes you just have to get everything out of the way of the artifact in question.
Makenna Goodman, Helen of Nowhere; cover design by Sarah Schulte (Coffee House Press, September 9)
A fresh approach to collage (and comic-book imagery).
Sarah Moss, Ripeness; cover art by Magali Cazo; cover design by Sara Wood (FSG, September 9)
I love how evocative, and weirdly uncomfortable, this art becomes when overlaid by the text.
Natsuo Kirino, tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, Swallows; cover design by Tyler Comrie (Knopf, September 9)
Funny, and simple, and unlike anything else. For the record, I also love the UK cover, by Jack Smyth.
M. L. Rio, Hot Wax; cover design by Ella Laytham (Simon & Schuster, September 9)
One of two book covers about records this month—except that this one is really about the title, which becomes the illustration spectacularly.
Jordan Castro, Muscle Man; cover design by Nicole Caputo (Catapult, September 9)
Gorgeous and restrained; the kind of book cover that makes you want to pick it up without seeming like it’s trying too hard.
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness; cover art by Mickalene Thomas; cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa (Mariner Books, September 16)
Perfect energy.
Katharina Volckmer, Calls May Be Recorded; cover design by Eric Obenauf (Two Dollar Radio, September 16)
There have been a lot of these Bento-box-style covers in recent years, and honestly I usually like them; this one has a ’70s energy that I find particularly endearing.
Mark Ronson, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ’90s New York City; cover design by Rodrigo Corral Studio (Grand Central, September 16)
The second solution for how to present a record (or at least a turntable0 on a book cover this month; also text-forward, but in an entirely different way.
Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising; cover design by Linda Huang; illustration by Laura Acquaviva (Pantheon, September 16)
Loving the color story here.
Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You; cover design by Lauren Peters-Collaer (Riverhead, September 23)
Deranged and irreverent and confrontational and a little silly, just like Lockwood’s writing.
John J. Lennon, The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us; cover design by Henry Sene Yee (Celadon, September 23)
I love the imposed frame, but I really love that it isn’t symmetrical.
Emily Temple
Emily Temple is the managing editor at Lit Hub. Her first novel, The Lightness, was published by William Morrow/HarperCollins in June 2020. You can buy it here.
