Publisher Description
A deeply personal reflection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake that explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer.
How do you clothe a book? Probing the complex relationships between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce, Lahiri delves into the role of the uniform; explains what book jackets and design have come to mean to her; and how, sometimes, “the covers become a part of me.”
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“Who hasn’t judged a book by its cover? Jhumpa Lahiri narrates an essay, originally written as a keynote speech, which examines the relationships among a book’s cover, the words within, the author, and readers. Her clear diction makes the short audiobook easy to understand as she muses about her often negative but sometimes ambivalent feelings about the covers of her books and what they say about her novels, as well as her strong feelings about how book jackets are often marketing tools rather than gateways into the story.”
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AudioFile
About Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri is a London-born American author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction who has won more than a dozen awards and medals, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut short-story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Among her other honors are the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, the Addison Metcalf Award, and a National Humanities Medal. She is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.