Nicole Caputo, creative director at Catapult Books, contributed to the abstract fashion with her cover for Zaina Arafat’s 2020 novel You Exist Too Much, imbuing the art with attractively shimmering gold stripes, and selected similarly vibrant, dancing flames for Shruti Swamy’s story collection of that same year, A House Is a Body.
It’s not a case of one or two designers running amok. It’s important to say here that neither authors nor the artists themselves can be blamed for the trend. For all their potential verve, these geometries are a far cry from the emphatic expressionism that dominated 20th-century painting - they are tepid and hesitant, more like the palette itself than any arresting vision one might create with these saturated hues. As critics and influencers continue to point out, cover art has in recent years regressed to a sort of algorithmic average: the colorful, crowded blobs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have that experience when browsing contemporary fiction today? To pick up a volume because it stands out as peculiar on its face? Too bad. I loved it, though, and not just for the arresting visual I also knew there was nothing like it in any bookstore I’d visited. I realized why my publishers had worded their message so gently: not every young author will be thrilled to see themselves removed from the prime real estate on their finished work. The front cover had become a striking, enigmatic image without context, one that invited curiosity and even a slight alarm. It also removed my name and the title of the novel, relegating those to the spine alone. The updated version that landed in my inbox kept the mask but changed the background to a violent red. We’d been going back and forth on a few concepts, including one design that featured a large respiratory mask seemingly strapped around the book itself - a reference to a fictional gaseous drug in the story.
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