Postscripts
Give That Jacket a Jacket
Fri., March 26, 1999
If you're a young hipster and into progressive fiction, and if you tend to let everyone you know in on the secret that you feel bleakly depressed about the fragmented, alienating nature of contemporary society -- or just want it to appear as if you do -- then Rob Weisbach Books is looking for you. To read their books. The William Morrow imprint began publishing books in 1996 and has steadily made a name for itself as a publisher of fresh, strong, and original voices. You just might not be aware of that if you only knew the jackets to their books, particularly the new work by Ben Neihart, Burning Girl, or last year's Virgin Fiction (a collection of previously unpublished, young writers' short stories), which in the context of its title has a most displeasing decoration (a cherry) on the cover. (The more recent Virgin Fiction 2 has two cherries.) That outré, slash-and-burn aesthetic belies the fact that what's on the inside of these books is really quite good and -- say it isn't so -- respectable.
"As far as I'm concerned, I'm not looking down on them," Weisbach says about his readers, "but sidling up to them because we are the people we're selling to." Only 33 years old, Weisbach can say with confidence that "a younger person being able to have control over advertising, promotions, jackets, the whole process, is what I think has given people the sense that the way we publish has a different look, not just physically, but a different feel than most publishers." Weisbach began life in the publishing world as an editorial assistant at Bantam Doubleday Dell in 1989 and eventually came to edit books by Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Reiser, and Ellen Degeneres as well as the Bantam Classics series, so when Morrow came knocking, they knew Weisbach as someone who had a literary and commercial background, especially since he had just come off three number one New York Times bestsellers.
About that jacket: Neihart says that "sometimes it, um, is startling to see my name directly above that photograph. I think it sort of serves as a fair warning to people when they read the book, so I really like that about it and I think it's simultaneously lurid and elegant in its own sort of way so it has a good tension. I like it." While talking about his book, Neihart articulated, as if by accident, one of the great things about literature: that you still -- despite all the vexing conglomeration in the publishing and bookselling industries -- can't judge a book by its cover. "My intention was to try to tell a serious story about loyalty," Neihart said, "underneath a sort of trashier surface that could hopefully be more engaging than a traditional telling of that sort of story. "
Small Press Month
The afternoon of free panels hosted by the Austin Writers' League at Borders this Saturday won't be quite as eye-popping as Burning Girl, but that seems appropriate since the panels are meant to honor Small Press Month and to provide alternatives to writers looking to be published. They are: a panel on nonfiction at 1pm and a panel on fiction at 4pm. Call 499-8914 or 795-9553 for more information.
