Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri explores what book jackets mean to both readers and writers in her new work besides seeking to explain the complex relationship between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce.
“The Clothing of Books”, published by Penguin Random House, is a personal reflection on how books are jacketed and what book jackets mean to both readers and writers.
How do we judge a book cover? Are book covers like the clothing that we choose to wear; and what do they say about us? And what is it like to have your clothing selected for you?
These are the questions Lahiri seeks to answer.
Exploring her relationship with covers — both as a writer and as a reader — Lahiri probes the complex relationship between text and image, author and designer, and art and commerce.
From her lasting affection for the specific editions of classic works she read in college to the shock of seeing one of her own jackets unfaithfully adorning a different book, Lahiri analyses what jackets mean to her, what happens when they don’t seem right, and how, sometimes, “the covers become a part of me, and I identify with them”.
Clothing, in general, has always carried additional layers of meaning for Lahiri.
“My mother, even today, 50 years after leaving India, wears only the traditional clothing of her country. She barely tolerated my American clothes. She did not find my jeans or T-shirts cute. When I became an adolescent, she disapproved of short skirts, high heels. The older I grew, the more it mattered to her that I, too, wear Indian or, at the very least, concealing clothing. She held out for my becoming a Bengali woman like her,” she writes.
Lahiri’s debut collection of stories “Interpreter of Maladies” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New Yorker Debut of the Year.
Her first novel, “The Namesake”, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture. Her second collection, “Unaccustomed Earth”, was the winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.