Blow Yourself Up is a story of first love across cities, spanning the decade that transformed the internet.

In the halls of an elite East Coast high school, Arjun and Payal fall in love as the world begins to tilt toward the digital. Over the next eight years, their trajectories diverge as sharply as the fractured internet itself. Payal ascends to the dizzying, dopamine-fueled heights of New York’s influencer economy, finding fame on Boost, a looping video app that is as rewarding as it is demanding. Meanwhile, in a cavernous office in Chicago, Arjun, a musician whose dreams have quieted, now cleans up the same platform’s debris, moderating the internet’s darkest videos. When a brutal act of political violence against a beloved musician goes viral, this rip in reality forces the pair to confront the motivations of the platforms they inhabit. A sharp exploration of creative ambition and the multifarious nature of identity, this is a story of love in the time of infinite scroll and a look at what we sacrifice to be seen.

Here is the cover, designed by Matt Avery:

Ankur Thakkar: This novel is a love story (and so, a ghost story), told from both characters’ perspectives, a will-they-won’t-they narrative spanning from the era of the first smartphones to when the internet scrambled our brains. It’s about making a creative life as the internet changed what creativity means. There aren’t obvious visuals for this story—rather, there are, but I wasn’t interested in them. The designer provided several great directions, but this figure immediately stood out. I couldn’t have dreamt it up myself, but it felt so right. There’s the tension between digital and analog life, of identities coming into being, and the undercurrent of yearning that guides both characters. I would have been equally drawn to the figure if it were stenciled on a wall, used as an album cover, or as a posthumous symbol. I’m so grateful to have this horny emo book reflected through Matt Avery’s palette.

Matt Avery: For this cover, we wanted to convey a few themes. The novel has two main characters that are very much online. But we didn’t want any overt references to social media or the internet. Another question was how to channel or play off the main title (without actually illustrating a “blow up”). The author and publisher provided a lot of promising suggestions and I was able to create or find a good number of options that felt like they resonated with the text. During that process, I remembered a couple figures I had drawn previously that I might be able to work with to suggest the characters’s grappling with identity—as well as their online experience. However, an expressed preference at the outset was for “no people/figures.” I understood why—and at the same time felt that by layering the drawings we wouldn’t depict a fixed identity and would provide a sufficiently open-ended reading. Are we seeing two people? One person transmogrifying? Or a digital will-o’-the-wisp? You’ll have to read the novel to (not) find out.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Blow Yourself Up” by Ankur Thakkar appeared first on Electric Literature.

65 writers and artists (many of whom are EL contributors whose work you can find here, here, and here) capture early motherhood in scenes and revelations: a vulnerable, kaleidoscopic record of postpartum life.

In the early days with their first babies, two friends began comparing notes on what, exactly, was going on in their postpartum bodies and minds. What was a wake window? How could anyone function under the weight of so much love? All their new-mom friends were overwhelmed too. In search of the book they needed, editors Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin invited 65 acclaimed writers and artists—Julia Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Liana Finck, Jenny Slate, Naima Coster, and more—to riff on shared concerns: burp volcanoes, career shifts, breastfeeding logs, partnership dynamics, minor victories and major insecurities. Here is a bedside table companion for every mother who has wondered how she’ll make it through the wilderness of early parenthood, and a window into her experience for the family and friends desperate to better care for their beloved moms-to-be. Brave, unexpected, and revelatory, Notes to New Mothers offers a new map of motherhood as both a singular and communal experience.

Here is the cover, designed by Sarahmay Wilkinson, with original artwork by Kristen Diederich:

Rebecca Knight: It took us a long time to find the right cover art for Notes to New Mothers because the structure of the book is so unusual. It’s a new form: a 60-writer chorus singing 582 tiny notes, in and out of harmony. It’s a juicy giftable item and an experimental, literary text. What kind of cover could cover both bases? It couldn’t be too literal (stock photo of pacifier stack) or too droopy (Mother’s-Day-Monet) or too floral or not floral enough or too feminine or too Gothic or too discouraging or too perky. We wanted it to be an accomplished aesthetic object in its own right, a soothing visual companion to house the warm community of voices inside. We wanted it to be elegant, energetic, timeless, simple, strong. We came up with a million almosts. And then, perusing the L.A. gallery LOBSTER CLUB’s 2026 Frieze Week group show, we discovered the work of painter Kristen Diederich.

Diederich’s paintings and our book are devoted to polyphony. She too is building up her images from the innumerable contributions of small strokes. Her instincts as a colorist, and as an abstract scribe of the natural world, are as various, understated, rapturous, and surprising as the prose stylings of our disparate, acclaimed writers. Looking at a Diederich painting is an invitation to investigate, to think and look again, all while relishing in the physical, the sumptuous. We came full circle with the project when we learned that Kristen attributes her painting practice to her own mother, also a painter, who found a way to combine creative output and childrearing. This is the very balance our contributors are in the midst of calibrating. We have been giddy about our cover ever since Kristen agreed to come on board. Norton’s Design Director Sarahmay Wilkinson, herself a new mother, created the cover with expert composition and iconic typography, all while tending to her own young son. We can’t imagine a fuller, finer, or more fitting artwork to invite readers into Notes to New Mothers.

Julie Buntin: Rebecca has captured exactly how I feel about Kristen’s artwork and how it evokes our book! I’ll just add that in addition to suggesting, via the swirls and blooms of color, the polyphony of the contents, the painting evokes such a tangible sense of transformation—the way the pink seems to be an almost reconfigured version of the green, the interrupting red, the moody, textural slashes of blue. For me, it speaks, in some nonverbal and very true-feeling way, to the murky, vibrant, and wildly complex early postpartum period.

Rebecca and I worked on this book together for years, and even when it was just an inkling, our vision for it was that however we collected these voices, the object—the book itself—would have to be distinct and beautiful. Something you’d want to put on your bedside table, that you’d be drawn to pick up even when dead tired, that would offer some sensory respite from all the glop and goo of newborn life. I have very precise memories of a book I read to both my children as tiny babies—one they loved—that had this gargantuan dust jacket that was always slipping off or getting folded up or in the wrong place, one more tiny thing I had to track and take care of. One day, it got half stuck under my nursing chair and partially ripped when I tried to pull it out, bending over my infant, which made her cry—and then I was crying, because what if I’d hurt her, and also why was the fucking dust jacket never where it was supposed to be? And wasn’t that my fault somehow? Those days are tough. Notes to New Mothers will have no dust jacket. The tactility of Kristen’s painting will work so brilliantly as paper-over-board, and Sarahmay’s sensitive way of setting off the type means that no amount of baby drool or sticky fingerprints or spilt milk will obscure the title. The book can take it, just as the mother can (even if she thinks she sometimes can’t).

Sarahmay Wilkinson: It was such a pleasure to collaborate with authors Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin in the creative process for their cover. It was important to our team to create something intimate and elevated while also lasting and durable; a gift that would live happily on a new parent’s chaotic nightstand. Kristen Diederich’s painting brought a sense of tenderness, atmosphere, and complexity that felt exactly right for the project. As a new-ish mum, I devoured this book, but really, truly, anyone who has ever been born should read this book.

Kristen Diederich: While painting, I often recall all the times I must have been held as a child, how these levels of care are linked and inseparable from the creative process, which itself is an act of mothering an idea into the world. In my case, these aspects of care are reflected in the image itself through the materiality of paint and mark making.

Growing up surrounded by creative women—a grandmother who crafted with her hands, an aunt who was a literature and theater teacher, and a mother, Tammy, who is a committed painter—gave rise to my interest in the arts.

For the past 10 years, I have been writing a single, continuous poem whose lines become titles for my paintings—among them, “Fuchsia is Slain by Observable Facts,” an abstract landscape of saturated pinks, blues, and greens, floral elements rising and dissolving through layers of glaze. I was delighted that this painting was chosen for this project because the story of my art practice is so deeply linked to my own mother.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Notes to New Mothers” edited by Rebecca Knight and Julie Buntin appeared first on Electric Literature.

After years of caring full-time for the children of the rich and the famous, our narrator has been struck, finally, with baby fever. Over a drink with sympathetic friends, she lists all the reasons why she wants to have a baby, beginning with a story about the intoxicating, abusive relationship with an ex-wife that she barely survived. She ponders how to fill the gaping void left in the wake of such horrific domestic violence. What’s the next most violent thing a woman can do to herself? she asks. Have a baby.

Soon, her story opens other doors to the past—the seemingly idyllic childhood she spent under her father’s roof; the mentorship, and judgment, of female writers whose children she has reared; and the man, her first love, who now seems to be offering her a second chance. Each unraveling thread reveals the complex tangle of thrill and pain, tradition and progress that has led her to this moment, this calling. Is it time for her to become a mother?

K Chiucarello’s stunningly original debut novel explores the brutality of gendered violence, including the gossip that polices women’s choices and the conventions that determine which women have the right to tell their story, and how. With wit, candor, and unprecedented nuance, Nanny Nanny upends every expectation of a book about motherhood, queering the biological clock and subverting narrative bounds.

Here is the cover, designed by Vivian Lopez Rowe with art by Julie Blackmon:

K Chiucarello: Even before I sold Nanny Nanny to Ecco, my editor, Deborah Ghim, and I talked about cover ideas. We are both very visual people and we wanted our mutual tastes to guide the editing process. I remember referencing Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Joy Williams’ Harrow—sparse covers where something was askew but the title read as grounded, assertive, nearly screaming. After we officially moved into editing, I created a mood board of original art work for more inspiration.

There was a lot of Robin F. Williams, Caroline Walker, Louise Giovanelli, Vanessa Baird, Rosalind Nashashibi, Genieve Figgis pinned—visual artists that focus a lot on gender performance and/or domestic labor. Something that Deborah and I spoke about often was that we didn’t want the cover to tip over into horror in any type of way, which became a difficult line to tread when pulling images.

When Julie Blackmon’s “Patio” landed it felt like the singular solution. In the expert hands of Vivian Lopez Rowe, our brilliant cover designer, Blackmon’s photograph perfectly encapsulates the world of NANNY NANNY. It was the lone photograph of the cover options but there was something nearly Kubrick-esque drawing me into the final product: the symmetry of the title, the geometry of the home, the flat perspective. There’s a lot of mirroring that happens in the novel—hetero versus queer relationships, city versus rural landscapes, the narrator’s ex-wife versus the children that the narrator nannies, etc. The little girl looking at an image of herself in the great hopes of finding an adult or something comforting inside, seeking out but being trapped in your own image or making, it spoke to the most major themes of the novel. The adult in the photograph that is reading a magazine entitled NEW YOU, the spiraled hose, the off-centered fire ablaze were little cherries on top.

Vivian Lopez Row: The publishing team and I agreed that we wanted the cover to depict motherhood, but not in a way that glamorized it or was idealistic about it. Early on I looked at paintings—to match the story, the women in them looked overwhelmed and exhausted. I then looked at photography and found the perfect cover image by Julie Blackmon. Her work blends the mundane and surreal moments of domesticity. This particular image, “Patio,” has a nostalgia that can relate to the main character’s childhood or her time as a nanny. It also shows a very real moment of exhausted distraction; even as a fire on the grill is blazing unattended, it’s like she has gotten used to the chaos in her life. For type, I went bold. I really wanted a contrast to the quieter elements of the cover image and to work with the fire to heighten the drama.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Nanny Nanny” by K Chiucarello appeared first on Electric Literature.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the award-winning poetry collection Not Here, Stegner and NEA Fellow Hieu Minh Nguyen’s Staying Still centers on the question of how: How do our anxieties around the idea of belonging estrange us from the very world we seek to belong in? How impossible does it feel to stay still and face ourselves? From the intimate longing of queer boyhood to the collective expectations imposed upon children of refugees, these poems face head-on the rejections, grief, and violence we fear in fractured family dynamics, love, and desire as we search for our place in this world.

Here is the cover, designed by Lucy Kim:

Hieu Minh Nguyen: The poems in Staying Still are searching for the right word, the right song, the right color to articulate loneliness—a loneliness found while surrounded by people, a loneliness that circles my experiences as, to simplify and be wrong, an undesirable. Driven by a longing to stay, the poems in Staying Still travel through grief and wonder, through yearning and nostalgia, gathering beloveds—alive and dead, far and near—on the dance floor.

I’ve been working on the poems in this book for the last nine years. To say I entered the cover process with a few loose ideas would be downplaying just how much of a control freak I am. I had a Pinterest board. I made mock-ups of the cover image. Not unlike how some people have their drag name picked out long before they ever step on a stage—and then, once they’re finally in it, full face and hair, they realize the name no longer fits. Let’s just say: Before I was Pam, I thought I was Napalmela. And before working with Lucy Kim, I was equally convinced I knew exactly what this cover should be.

Then Lucy started sending options, and suddenly the book got bigger than my little vision for it. Her drafts didn’t flatter my expectations—they messed with them. They cracked the book open in ways I hadn’t planned for, offering new angles on the loneliness at the center of this collection. I never would have imagined anything like this as the cover before working with her, and now I truly can’t imagine it being anything else.

The image is dark and vibrant at once, erotic and melancholic. The outside gestures toward the inside in ways I didn’t expect. Each poem becomes a small room. The cover asks new questions—are we inside the room, or only looking in through a window? It makes me think about how loneliness feels from within: like the only house on the block, the only house for miles. And yet, from the outside, loneliness has neighbors. Our lonelinesses share walls.

Lucy Kim: The poems in this collection have a through-line of longing and loneliness: of self vs. other. There’s a restlessness in the narrative voice, of bodies constantly moving in the world, together but never in sync. It’s a challenging concept to convey on a cover, much less in a single still image. But what benefited me greatly is that Hieu has a background in visual arts himself and we began a dialog of sending images back and forth until, ultimately, landing on this image of apartment windows at night—familiar to any urban dweller yet made abstract by the erasing of details in its nighttime setting. There’s a musicality to the pattern in which the window lights are on or off and in different colors highlighting the different lives within . . . a striking visual metaphor for the concept of “together in separate spaces.”

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Staying Still” by Hieu Minh Nguyen appeared first on Electric Literature.

Asmodeus is a hallucinatory thriller about a failing demon’s search for a new host in post-dictatorship Santo Domingo.

Asmodeus, a millennia-old demon, has inhabited Rudy, a once-legendary Dominican rock star, for decades. But in 1992, the demon’s powers begin to fade. What follows is a desperate weeklong odyssey as Asmodeus ricochets through the bodies of the inhabitants of Santo Domingo’s underworld: from Guinea, a young metalhead plotting a warehouse heist, to Mireya, the daughter of a former torturer, to other souls caught in his chaotic orbit. Each possession reveals another layer of a city still reeling from the Balaguer dictatorship. And each new host engenders a surprising tenderness in the demon.

From acclaimed musical artist and author Rita Indiana, Asmodeus is written in urgent prose punctuated by original décimas, ten-line rhyming poems drawing from Latin American musical and oral tradition. Indiana weaves together Dominican heavy metal, black magic, and political trauma. Asmodeus is a supernatural noir, riotous thriller, and searing portrait of a nation grappling with its complicated past.

Here is the cover, designed by Luísa Dias: 

Rita Indiana: For the cover of the English translation of Asmodeo, I wanted something that resonated with the headbanger I once was—the 13-year-old kid who read Dante and The Possession of Joel Delaney by Ramona Stewart a hundred times. I knew I didn’t want a demon with a human face; Asmodeus has no body of his own, no fixed form. I love the old-print feel and the typography. It’s the perfect cover for the metal mixtape living inside the novel.

Luísa Dias: Designing the cover for Asmodeus was a project of pure visual intensity. I have long admired the books Graywolf Press publishes, so it was a joy to be introduced to Rita Indiana’s work through such a powerful vision. It turned out to be one of the most intensely creative projects I have worked on, as it asked for a mix of heavy metal, Dominican history, and psychedelic dread, paired with colors that “can cause seizures.” As a designer, that is a terrifying but incredibly exciting challenge, as I rarely get the chance to be that aggressive and honest with a cover design.

To meet that challenge, I looked at the author’s inspiration in the artist Skinner, whose abstract figures pushed me away from classic imagery. Since my process involves taking existing forms apart, I searched for a figure that could serve as a skeletal host. I found that presence in a 1915 woodcut by Huib Luns titled “Bellona.” Its raw, jagged energy felt like the perfect vessel to be possessed by a new kind of horror.

In my initial proposals, I experimented with vibrant colors against dark backgrounds, but the bright orange and yellow tones eventually hit the right sense of visual shock. For the final cover, this demon became a faceless flame with a single eye peeking through its mouth. I wanted the image to feel both ancient and explosive. All in all, I hope this cover refuses to leave the reader indifferent, and I am so grateful to Rita Indiana for letting me be a small part of her fierce universe!

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Asmodeus” by Rita Indiana, Translated by Achy Obejas appeared first on Electric Literature.

As witty as it is honest, as dark as it is blindingly bright, Jendi Reiter’s poetry collection Introvert Pervert weaves pop culture, personal experience, and lightning intellect to explore our American trauma, our “reptilian sludge,” and our absolute and complete need for love—and to love.

Here is the cover, designed by Susan Pearce with art by Jendi Reiter:

Jendi Reiter: When planning this collage, I was envisioning an image that would combine flamboyance and concealment. Sources that inspired me include Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits” sculptures and the queer collage anthology Cock, Paper, Scissors. My collages often juxtapose homoerotic magazine photos with “wholesome” and “feminine” scrapbooking materials as a way of integrating my past girlhood with my present as a trans man—both rebelling against good-girl repression, and reclaiming those colors and textures that have always given me sensory joy regardless of gender assignment.

Susan Pearce: Working with this bold image, I felt the lettering should be supportive but not overwhelming. I chose the magenta color to anchor the image at the bottom. Matching the color in the headdresses, I chose cyan to pull the eye upward towards the title.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Introvert Pervert” by Jendi Reiter appeared first on Electric Literature.

The breathtaking and consequential first novel in nearly two decades from the award-winning author of the cult sensation, The Orange Eats Creeps.

In the late 19th century on a remote California beach, two young tramps—Paulette and Kenneth—threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon.

A handful of years later, the Central Coast town of Anzar has become the stomping grounds for all manner of cults, eccentrics, earth religions, and communal living. Presiding over the town from the luxe frivolity of their family manor, the Hasleys have ruled Anzar for generations. Their grip on the town is threatened by the rise of the working class, and their union with the vagrant population. Meanwhile, Paulette has taken up residence in the home of Johnny Hasley, a wealthy faux-socialist poseur, hoping to become his wife. Her plans are complicated by boot-prints in the garden signaling the arrival of Kenneth, who carries with him a dark secret that poses a grave threat to both of them.

In Anzar’s cracked mirror, Californian freakiness meets Victorian preoccupations with the domestic, pollution and filth, haunted houses, fringe societies, living death, spiritualism, vampiric women, and class parasites. Acid Green Velvet is a surreal powder keg of nihilism, fathers and their failures, manifest destiny, and American identity, penned in rapturous prose by the fiercest writer of her generation.

Here is the cover, designed by Eric Obenauf with art by Scott Treleaven:

Grace Krilanovich: I first became aware of Canadian artist Scott Treleaven’s work in 2007, with his solo show at Marc Selwyn Fine Art called “Witchcraft Through the Ages.” I was instantly intrigued by a series of iconographic collage works presenting a queer occult realm which drew heavily from the world of zines, underground film, queercore, pagan ritual, punk and goth. Casting their long cultural shadows were Crowley, Genet, Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Darby Crash, and Genesis P-Orridge. The pictures teemed with wolves and dogs, flowers, snakes, knives, insects, and sigils. Treleaven’s human subjects—most he photographed himself—were transposed onto the rotting environs of the squat and the punk show, the forests of violent fairy tales, ruins, or desecrated city streets. Guys in repose, laden with flowers, or napping with wolves; guys bearhugging huge bouquets of flowers. There were mountains of skulls; there were long strands of saliva. The textures of Xerox, hand-cut paper, and watercolor washes made the collages sparkle with an uncanny spell-like power. After seeing the exhibition, I sought out Treleaven’s 2007 monograph Some Boys Wander By Mistake, with texts by Dennis Cooper. I was just starting to write what would later become Acid Green Velvet. “Witchcraft” and Some Boys seeped into my writing, and reverberated eerily with the draft I’d already started, the path I was making with this book. Treleaven’s work is part of the novel’s DNA.

Two Dollar Radio publisher Eric Obenauf and I collaborated on the design. The cover looks slightly like an Olympia Press Traveller’s Companion book, which is cool. I’m glad it’s not making literal use of the color “acid green.” I’m also glad Eric talked me out of the psychedelic font I’d assumed this title should have, considering the book’s “Gilded Age meets the Age of Aquarius” conceit. But no, an elegant serif typeface was what suited best. I’m a sucker for that red-orange.

Scott Treleaven granted permission to use his art (so grateful for that!), and sent me dozens of files. I chose this collage because of the connection to dogs/wolves in the book, but also this guy’s attitude is just so off-kilter and enigmatic, crouching nude with his animal friend and enormous flowers. You can’t really see his face, so he could be almost any man in the book. His stance is loose and rangy, but he’s ready to pounce. He’s waiting. The look in the wolf’s eye is bashful, a little mysterious. Delicate spidery chrysanthemums dominate the background. The photo could plausibly be from 1880 or 1967, which is tantalizing, and meshes with the novel’s slipperiness and the liberties it takes with time and place. Who does this guy think he is, the vanguard of some new ferocious form of flower power? My characters are often trying to justify their actions by claiming a quasi-animal lineage. They seek to revert to an imagined ancient state of being, a false purity they think gives them the upper hand in the aftermath of societal collapse.

Eric Obenauf: I originally pictured a design along the lines of a poster I saw for Eddington, which I learned was a piece of art by David Wojnarowicz addressing the AIDS crisis. Acid Green Velvet conflates contemporary sensibilities with characters in a historical setting, so I was researching archival illustrations of animals, landscapes, and the American west, imagining presenting them in a hip, modern manner.

Grace has lived with this book for nearly two decades and had strong ideas for how she wanted to package the book. I’m a sucker for texture on book covers, and Scott Treleaven’s artwork is wonderfully tactile and absolutely striking, while also feeling simultaneously punk and timeless. I can understand why Grace wanted to feature it on the cover. Thankfully Scott was into the idea, and from there it was just a matter of settling on the perfect fonts and alignment.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Acid Green Velvet” by Grace Krilanovich appeared first on Electric Literature.

It’s 1908, and itinerant spirit medium Madame Ilsa von Hoffmann is at the end of her professional rope, facing down two unappealing options: join an ill-conceived commune founded by some fellow trans ex-vaudevillians, or take on a high-paying but mysterious job offered by a religious extremist in Salt Lake City. Madame Ilsa opts for Utah and the employ of one Roger Marsh who, it turns out, wants her to summon the ghost of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, to give his blessing to Marsh’s fledgling offshoot of the mainstream church.

Unsure how she’ll pull off this near-impossible task, Ilsa finds an ally in Francie Bream, an East Coast journalist in town to profile Mormon women at the dawn of the twentieth century. Bream’s motives remain obscure to Ilsa, though she begins to suspect the journalist has an agenda far more sinister than she could have imagined. Complicating the situation further are an inept and volatile henchman, a relentlessly orthodox Mormon apostle, a copper magnate with a fetish for polygamists, Marsh’s rogue third wife, and a vengeful private investigator from Ilsa’s past. As dead bodies accumulate around her, Madame Ilsa worries less and less about saving her career, and more about making it out of Salt Lake City alive.

Here is the cover, designed by Roderick Brydon:

T.I.M. Wirkus: One of the hardest parts of writing a novel is getting the finished book into the hands of its ideal readers. Like many novels, A Bad Deal in Mormon Land has elements that are broadly appealing (suspense, murder, intrigue, séances, jokes), as well as more idiosyncratic (its audience exists at the Venn overlap of people who want to read an anti-capitalist novel with a messy trans protagonist, and people looking for a story about a moment in Mormon history that’s obscure even to most Mormons).

How do you even begin to convey all that during the micro-instant of attention any book is likely to receive from a weary reading public?

I was thrilled when I first saw Roderick Brydon’s design, because his cover does that work so beautifully. The colors convey both the drama and playfulness of the novel, the hand-drawn look reflects the weirdness, and the images—the beehive, the angel, the praying figures—evoke Mormonism and Utah at the beginning of the twentieth century. I can only hope people enjoy reading the novel as much as I enjoy looking at this cover.

Roderick Brydon: I set out to create a cover that has both a mystical and humorous tone, incorporating the Mormon elements in a smoky, tarot card-like way. Each element is indicative of either Mormon iconography, the geographical features of Utah, or the themes of the story–framing the protagonist, while the design (quite literally) strangles her, maintaining that sense of unease, urban claustrophobia, and an almost mythical intrigue. The color scheme is to highlight the many layers of themes the story holds, the red (on black) giving a sense of danger, and the warm to cold gradient giving a slight absurd mood . . . providing a modern feel, while also keeping it rooted in the time period with that handcrafted feel. A bonus detail are the words “A Novel” spelt in the Mormon language of Deseret. Just thought that might add something unique to the design.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal of “A Bad Deal in Mormon Land” by T.I.M. Wirkus appeared first on Electric Literature.

Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.

Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?

The Emilys is a capacious, profound book about how love of all kinds—love between friends, between mothers and kids, between strangers and neighbors, love for the earth—opens up new possibilities. It asks: How will we learn to live in an altered world? How will we keep each other safe? And when the darkness comes, how will we find joy?

Here is the cover, designed by Elena Giavaldi:

Heather Abel: The first time my daughter rolled down a hill was in the tall grass behind a farmer’s market. She was nervous, so I laid down and showed her how, which she found hilarious. She reached the bottom exhilarated, grass clinging to her red curls. I watched her tiny legs trudge back up the hill—it seemed like a mountain—and as she rolled again, my joy leaped up to match hers. It had been a long day. All those days were long. But I suddenly felt so beautifully alive, part of the green grass, the autumn sky, her laughter. Just then, another mother walked up to me, shaking her head. “Careful,” she warned, motioning toward my girl. “Ticks. People are getting sick.”

This is it, I thought: Motherhood. The triumphant joy, the inescapable danger.

I started writing The Emilys with that moment in mind. In my novel, a mysterious illness unsettles a small New England town. It sounds scary, but it’s not dystopian. The book follows the people in the town—especially two moms—as they come together to figure out what’s happening. What interests me about our treacherous world is how we carry each other to safety. How we laugh ourselves through trouble. Because it’s not enough to warn each other, we have to join each other.

Contradiction became the pulse of the novel. How to love the natural world, even as we humans have changed nature in really terrifying ways? Where do you find happiness if you’re unable to go into the sunshine? I leaned on these lines from Rilke: “Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.”

I wanted a cover that showed nature as a place of real solace, and also of potential danger. When I saw Elena’s cover, I gasped. It’s the cover of my dreams. I love the little girl hidden by the mysterious pink dot. Here childhood seems both innocent and imperiled. The girl’s white dress reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s, the poet who floats in the background of The Emilys. And I love all the green, the tangled grass, the low leaves. Sure, it makes me nervous. But I also just want to dive into that green and see what I find there.

Elena Giavaldi: For this cover, I knew from the very beginning that the main color had to be green. It’s a color that shows up constantly in the book, and nature is such an important element throughout the story. Even though the novel touches on intense themes, there’s still an underlying sense of optimism, and the cover needed to reflect both. The design had to feel lush, green, and inviting, but also a bit off—slightly eerie, with an edgy quality. The artwork aims to capture that balance, while the pink elements lift the mood and make you wonder what they are and why they’re there. The title is so strong that I felt it needed a bold typeface to really make it stand out. It’s been a pleasure diving into this novel and finding the right cover direction!

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Inspired by the poet’s identities as an educator, a son, and a Filipino American, A Holy Dread emerges out of questions, hopes, and unshakeable fears about the world we have created and the world our children will inherit.

Villanueva’s sophomore collection grapples with mortality, fatherhood, grief, and every-day life in the Anthropocene with formal balance and restraint. Intense, tight lyrics mirror the speaker’s reality: equal wonderment and worry, tenderness and calamity, beauty and sorrow.

These unrelenting poems—part prayer, part pleading—traverse the complexities of peril, faith, and fear with precision and bravery. The poems in A Holy Dread search for joy and hold it dear, even as things fall apart around us.

Here is the cover, designed by Tiani Kennedy with cover art by Carzen Arpa Esprela:

R. A. Villanueva: There’s about a decade between my first book, Reliquaria, and A Holy Dread. In that time, I’ve continued a creative practice that’s sustained me through the attendant bewilderments and blessings of keeping alive: year after year, I carry a small, lined journal of notes and ephemera, quotes and sketches with me everywhere; in myriad ways, those commonplace books couple with the digital bookmarks I keep, and an ever-mutating folder synced to my devices named “Catalysts, &c.” where I drop paintings, PDFs, screenshots of group chats, scans of photographs, and more. The combination of those materials is charged with meaning, strangeness, brilliance, surprise.

The consistency and devotion to this wildly personal curatorial work has been a comfort for me—a way to remix the beautiful volatility of the world’s texts with my own fixations, my anxieties, and my ongoing desire to gather close and see anew.

So when the moment came to pair words with visuals, to turn toward cover designs, I found myself digging through drawers and shelves, searching for those books and their rhymes with with A Holy Dread. I eventually stacked them on the couch next to me, flipping through my doodles and lists, memories of gallery visits, lesson plans and lecture notes, diagrams and drafts.

I knew that I wanted the artwork to feature a Filipino painter. I wanted, too, for the image itself to call back to what I’ve been reckoning with across the body of my writing: the sacred and the mortal, the elegy and the praise song, the pressures of language and tradition, grief and gratitude.

With neon pink-fearlessness and heart, Carzen Arpa Esprela’s Full House (Ikot-ikot Po) brings dimension to all those hopes and hauntings. I was immediately drawn to the ghostly figures, their radiance and transcendence, their physicality and intimacy. They’re gathered on the front lawn, a family floating together and framed by luminous, all-caps, sans-serif type. I’m so thankful for the interplay of the title with the art—and how everything pulses with this affirmation from Sandra Cisneros: “We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”

Tiani Kennedy: Designing the cover for A Holy Dread was an iterative and collaborative process. The artwork selected for the collection is visually rich; it’s full of movement, color, and layered symbolism. As a result, its complexity made it both inspiring and challenging to integrate clear, impactful typography. I explored several directions to understand how the image interacted with type and to align with the poet’s specific vision. As we refined concepts, we returned to an early idea with a clearer sense of what resonated. The final cover features bold, white typography that frames the haunting central imagery, ensuring legibility without sacrificing the artwork’s intensity. The result is a design that feels intentional and attuned to the emotional world of the poems.

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