Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary Theory, History & Criticism

How do we judge a book cover? Are book covers like the clothing that we choose to wear? What do they say about us? And what is it like to have your clothing selected for you? These are the questions at the heart of this thoughtful meditation on the art of the book jacket, from acclaimed, bestselling author Jhumpa Lahiri. 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, 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 analyzes 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.'

Jhumpa Lahiri was born 1967 in London, England, and raised in Rhode Island. She is a graduate of Barnard College, where she received a B.A. in English literature, and of Boston University, where she received an M.A. in English, M.A. in Creative Writing and M.A. in Comparative Studies in Literature and the Arts, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was translated into twenty-nine languages and became a bestseller both in the United States and abroad. In addition to the Pulitzer, it received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison Metcalf Award, and a nomination for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Lahiri was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is Jhumpa Lahiri's first novel. She lives in New York with her husband and son.