Ever since FSG Originals came out with the now-classic Southern Reach covers, there has been what seems like an ongoing competition to create amazing original art and design for other editions, from the somber grace of the original UK hardcovers to, well,...

Now through July 30, 2017, MCDxFSG is holding a fan art contest to celebrate the release of Jeff VanderMeer's Borne. The contest is limited to two-dimensional interpretations of the shape-shifting, color-changing, mind-boggling biotech Borne. You might find the following passages from the early...

Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...

One of the first chairs you need, when furnishing a new home, is a dining chair. You can make do with cushions on the floor instead of an easy chair, as I did in my first apartment, and you can read a book or...

The Tale of Shikanoko is a four-volume epic set in the mythic, medieval Japan of Lian Hearn’s imagination. The first volume, Emperor of the Eight Islands, comes out in the United States on April 26; the remaining volumes will all be published...

In 1995 Witold Rybczynski published his first article in The New Yorker. Afterwards Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor, invited him to join her for lunch at her famous table at the Royalton where she asked him what he would like to write about next....

Last month the United States Postal Service issued a Flannery O’Connor stamp, complete with a glowing portrait and peacock feathers. Coincidentally, we also recently reissued all of O’Connor’s fiction with new covers painted by June Glasson and designed by Charlotte...

One of the great pleasures of seeing The Southern Reach Trilogy in print has been the ingenuity and sophistication of the foreign language editions. Among the absolute best of the many versions are Destino’s covers for the Spanish editions. Destino commissioned artist and designer Pablo Delcán to create these covers, which capture the surreal vibe of the novels as well as the theme of transformation running through the narrative. I caught up with Delcán via email to ask him about how he created these striking images, and to share with readers some early versions. You can experience more of his amazing work at his website. Spanish readers can also check out the Destino Southern Reach webpage.

In April 2014, art director Charlotte Strick and typographer Jude Landry gave FSG’s Bernard Malamud library a sharp makeover on the occasion of Malamud’s centenary. Here we reveal the new, soon-to-be-classic covers for the first time, and Charlotte and Jude discuss the ins and outs of giving a new look to a true icon of twentieth-century American literature. Sean McDonald: What’s it like to be assigned a project like redesigning the entire oeuvre of a great American writer, one who’s having his 100th birthday this month, who’s going into the Library of America as we speak? What’s your first step?

by Charlotte Strick Part of my job as Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Paperback Art Director is the repackaging of books from our illustrious backlist. Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond resulted in one of my favorite recent redesigns. To start, we typically mine our company’s massive library archive to see how the title was packaged over the decades. Sometimes there’s a hidden gem sitting on the shelves that’s been waiting to be rediscovered. In 1954, when our company was known as Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, the first edition hardcover of Macaulay’s novel boasted a jacket illustration and design by the venerable Milton Glaser, who is responsible for several of my favorite mid-century FSG jackets, but this one wasn’t as bold or as graphic as those others. The trusty internet turned up a more abstract solution by one of my design heroes, Alvin Lustig. Published in paperback by Meridian Fiction in 1960, it sold for a mere $1.35. Over the years, there had also been different photographic cover treatments by other publishing houses that took less artful approaches, trying perhaps to appeal to more contemporary audiences.

When I got off the ferry in the harbor of the Greek island of Sifnos in 1972, I was 21 years old and very serious about being a painter. I had had three successful shows and I had just been accepted to a three-year Master of Fine Arts program at the Royal College of Art in London. I was, I guess, a little full of myself, but very disciplined. Drawing and painting were all that mattered to me, and I had come to Sifnos looking for a quiet place in the sun to work in peace.

Amelia Gray grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Her first collection of stories, AM/PM, was published in 2009. Her second collection, Museum of the Weird, was awarded the Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles. THREATS is her first novel. You may have already seen Amelia Gray reciting book passages from the back of a moped, or declaiming threats to a boisterous audience in Washington, D.C. So with Gray's novel THREATS in mind, we built a site that addresses one question: Would you like to send vaguely menacing epistles to friends, loved ones, and enemies?

T. M. Wolf is the author of Sound, which will be published by Faber & Faber in April. He is twenty-nine, grew up on the New Jersey Shore, and he has written for a variety of music publications, particularly on hip-hop. He recently graduated from Yale Law School. You can follow him on Twitter @tom_tm_wolf. You have a tremendous academic record and this is something of a departure from your studies. How and why did you come to write this novel? When I was in the early stages of writing Sound (2005 to 2008), I was bouncing around a lot, basically moving from one school and one academic program to the next. I was working very hard trying to “find” something (I’m still not quite sure what) and learning a lot, but I still felt like I was missing something (again, I’m not sure exactly what). At the time—and I still think this is true—fiction seemed like a more versatile, and maybe more productive, way to explore ideas that my academic work kept kicking up but that academic methods didn’t seem flexible enough to address. These were all questions of experience, I guess: what it feels like to be human, how our minds work, how we relate to other people, what it’s like to be answer-oriented in a world that’s chaotic and doesn’t yield answers all that readily.