The Killed Covers of First Aid for Choking Victims
+ the one we picked
We have pushed the release of First Aid for Choking Victims (stories by Matthew Zanoni Müller) to November, which gives you extra time to preorder it. While you’re waiting for it to arrive, have a gander at the variety of covers Angelo Maneage, whom you should hire if you need a design, gave us to choose from. (The text beneath each cover image is straight from the email Angelo sent us.)
I’ll reveal the selected cover at the end; feel free to guess as you scroll down (and of course you may have already seen it on twitter, sorry). Feel free, as well, to tell us your picks in the comments.
1.
Thinking about the colors of rural, semi isolation, and the vignette/story form. Houses stacking, with one shadow, as if to comment on the relationship between all the characters in this collection.
2.
A more personal approach of a perspective-based portrait, the interior of painting of upstate NY. I feel it's almost a more symbolic Everyman. Thinking of the essence of “She was a black silhouette proceeding through a world of white outlines.”
3.
Same painting as 2 only now with a mouth via shifted piece of the painting. That idea of juxtaposing to make something new.
4.
Boots, the Big Man Boots. Though a small mention, it seemed to be a level of comfort that I feel some stories yearn for.
5.
Though not a specific dog from the collection (not a lab), I thought a fair amount about their sixth sense, and the idea of the relationship they have as a general symbol to humans to be juxtaposed with grief or doom or control or lack of control (a scythe).
6.
Another dog idea, figuring out how to balance on rocky darkness.
7, 8, 9
.
I got inspired on a surface level by the idea of first aid, the symbol for it, so I zoomed in on the + and pulled a few images from the environments in the stories (trailer, tornado, pines, isolation, silhouettes, relationship). One explores an abstract tree as a reaper; grief glooms through here.
10.
This one's a little more intense of an image, but I think it really powerfully captures the idea of a dysfunctioned relationship. thinking about this line as an image: “Fuck,” he mouthed, and grabbed at his skull, moved it around like a dog wrestling a rope toy."
We ended up going with number 1, the stack of houses. It was Matt’s first choice: “I was drawn to the cover because of the precariousness of the stack of houses, how it looked like everything could come tumbling down at any moment even as it also looked like the houses were reaching up toward something. This encapsulated so much of what the book is about for me, where the characters in these stories are both searching for something while trying not to fall apart. I also liked the color scheme for its rural qualities, as Angelo had said in his design notes, and the playful and surreal design of the houses themselves, which spoke to the elements in my stories that teeter on the brink of the realism in which they're set toward something a bit otherworldly. A kind of metaphysical interiority.” Cover number 1 was also Matt’s wife’s first pick, and also my wife’s. And my kids’. And it was my first choice. It never lines up this way. I hope you like it too. And even more, I hope you buy it because we have to sell books in order to keep making books and paying people to design their covers, and more importantly it’s a wonderful, big meaty book filled with long, meandering stories, and I want a lot of people to read it.