Cover revealed for Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder

The book covers of short story anthologies tend to be non-committal toward the stories, when it comes to pictures or other images. There are exceptions. I’ve got a Poe collection with a drawing of a raven, a Christie collection with a magnifying glass, and a Hemingway collection with a painting of Mt. Kilimanjaro. A few others have pictures of the author. But the vast majority of anthologies I own simply feature text on their covers. Of course, if the author is Vonnegut or Salinger or Oates or Pynchon or Wright or O.Henry that’s pretty much all you need on a book cover in order to sell the book.

The rest of us need eye-catchers. I’m counting on people to judge my book by its cover.

This spring I intend to publish my first collection of short stories, titled Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder. The big question: what sells a debut short story anthology?

For that I turned to the incredible Barbara Russell of Blohm Graphic Design.

She has come up with a book cover design featuring a collage of images representing several stories in the collection. The cover is stark and simple, yet remarkably effective in both grabbing attention and conveying the diversity of themes in this collection, from the brutality of “Disposable Girl” to the dark humor of “Versipellis Nemora” to the satire of “The 291” to the wonder of “Arlene, the White Oak Tree.”

And for good measure she threw in blood splatters, which now appear on three of my four book covers, a motif for my works, I suppose.

Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder will be published in late May (exact date yet to be determined) by Off-University Press, the same house that published my first novel, The Roswell Swatch. I’m also planning to publish my third novel, The Space Coast Tatler, on or about the same date, also coming from Off-University Press.

And here it is, the full cover reveal for Disposable Girl and Other Tales of Brutality and Wonder: