The Dark Genius of Wall Street

Please, Ms/Mr Art Director and Ms/Mr Marketing Person, have the balls NOT to put a stock certificate on a book about Wall Street. Please.

The Truth About Hilary

I never would have expected it, but this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I really expected blood-dripping fangs and cavorting lesbians.

The Method Actors

Not much to say, except that mushrooms are delicious and look good from the bottom.

The Task of This Translator

How many times has this been done? My guess: a bajillion.

We're All in This Together

Bad typography or good eyechart?

Killing Yourself to Live

I like the positioning of the type here, as well as being reminded exactly how cool the Flying V guitar is.

Star Dust

Love it? Hate it? Too obvious?

Divided By God

Ah, if only more problems could be addressed / solved with a table saw.

No Country for Old Men

Not the best scan.

And not the best review in the Times:

"Cormac McCarthy's new wave, hard-boiled Western tale would have been considerably more persuasive if it did not include tedious, long-winded monologues from the protagonist." Ouch.

Cover by Chip Kidd? Anyone know?

A Long Stay in a Distant Land

I like this. Starting to see this font (in the title) a bit too often, though.

The Last Flight of the Flamingo

What would *you* have done with the type?

The Loss of Leon Meed

The People of Paper

OK, I don't know about y'all, but I think this is gorgeous.



And check out the brief review from Amazon.com:

Plascencia's mannered but moving debut begins with an allegory for art and the loss that drives it: a butcher guts a boy's cat; the boy constructs paper organs for the feline, who is revivified; the boy thus becomes the world's first origami surgeon. Though Plascencia's book sometimes seems to take the form of an autobiographical attempt to come to terms with a lost love, little of this experimental work—a mischievous mix of García Márquez magical realism and Tristram Shandy typographical tricks—is grounded in reality. Early on we meet a "Baby Nostradamus" and a Catholic saint disguised as a wrestler while following the enuretic Fernando de la Fe and his lime-addicted daughter from Mexico to California. Fernando—whose wife, tired of waking in pools of piss, has left him—settles east of L.A. in El Monte. He gathers a gang of carnation pickers to wage a quixotic war against the planet Saturn and, in a Borges-like discovery, Saturn turns out to be Salvador Plascencia. Over a dozen characters narrate the story while fighting like Lilliputians to emancipate themselves from Plascencia's tyrannical authorial control. Playful and cheeky, the book is also violent and macabre: masochists burn themselves; a man bleeds horribly after performing cunnilingus on a woman made of paper. Plascencia's virtuosic first novel is explosively unreal, but bares human truths with devastating accuracy.

Johnny Mad Dog

I really like this.

Hot Property

Not sure that I love this, but it's a simple solution, and simple is good :-)

Let's Have Some Fun!

I've noticed something I've wanted to discuss for awhile. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes the illustrations in the NY Times Sunday Book Review are much more interesting than the covers of the books themselves. Here's an example:





Is it me, or is the NY Times illustration better?

The Hummingbird's Daughter

A bad scan, but betcha this is gorgeous. I love cut paper.