The week in books

[Dave Monroe]

The week in books

Poetic tweets, 50 Cent meets Alan Bennett, and literary scrawls for sale

    * John Crace and John Dugdale
    * The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009

[...]

• Paul Baggaley, Picador's new publisher, announced his first
acquisitions this week, with 11 novels by the late Roberto Bolaño
("challenging, weird, extraordinary but also completely readable") the
most notable results of his shopping spree. "We are creating a whole
look for Bolaño," he said, "creating a brand." No clues were given
about this look, and Picador's jacket for 2666 is not auspicious: the
symbolist kitsch of Gustave Moreau's Jupiter and Semele (a
19th-century French artist depicting a Greek myth) seems to have been
chosen to illustrate a Latin American novel set in the 20th century -
and partly in Ciudad Juárez, the murder-blighted Mexican border city -
mostly because it's gaudy and crowded; and a large gold band across
the centre, carrying praise for the Chilean author, clumsily obscures
much of it.

Picador's current efforts with its most eminent living novelists also
fail to inspire confidence. Its jackets for Don DeLillo are dominated
by white, with small multicoloured collages that do little to
encourage you to try to decode them. The Naipaul brand is a disaster,
with some covers sharing a glum off-white look but others wildly
dissimilar in colour and layout. The Cormac McCarthy designs are at
least uniform, but inane literalism makes them ridiculous: fallen
fruit for The Orchard Keeper, pretty horses for All the Pretty Horses,
a young man for No Country for Old Men and - you guessed it - a road
for The Road

Does it make sense to turn a literary novelist into a "brand" in this
way? Imposing a uniform design is more apt with, say, Ian Rankin's
Rebus novels, which fit the definition of a brand as a class of
products. But Vintage's current jackets for Thomas Pynchon, for
example (which incongruously resemble Where's Wally? pictures with
their plethora of tiny people and objects), in no way reflect the
differences between works such as Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of
Lot 49....

[...]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/books-news-twitter-maya-angelou

Dugdale, John.  Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power
   New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

See, e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010&msg=50310
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&keywords=dugdale
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v037/37.2.weisenburger.html