Mmmmmm, beer!

This little spot was in last Sunday's New York Times' book review of Robert Coover's new short story collection, Going for a Beer.

 The review describes a few of the stories in the collection, including "Invasion of the Martians," and many others suffused with magic and mythology. The title story concerns a man whose life seems little more than a drunken haze, bouncing from one experience to the next, with the next experience happening before the current is even finished. And, of course, a fair share of them transpire at a bar. I wanted to combine the temptation of going down the bar for a cold one with some of the elements from other stories, and a beer bottle cap as a flying saucer ended up a nice way to do it. Go pick up the collection! Thank you to Matt, AD for this one!

You read my mind

For a book review in The New York Times of Fiona Maazel's third novel: A Little More Human.

Brainiac fiction- as the review calls it- about a man who can read minds, plus a whole lot of other stuff. Read the review, or better yet, read the book.

Thank you to the always wonderful Matt Dorfman, AD on this!

Four lives to live

I did this New York Times Book Review piece a couple weeks back, and it ran in yesterday's Sunday paper. For the new Paul Auster novel,
4 3 2 1:

The book follows the formative years of Archie Ferguson, through four, alternate, parallel lives. One of the few commonalities between all these lives: Amy Schneiderman. As Tom Perrotta's review remarks: "The multiple love stories of Ferguson and Amy- sometimes consummated, sometimes thwarted- form the heart of the novel and bring the strengths of Auster's peculiar narrative structure into sharp focus." Read the review here, or pick up a copy of the book. Thank you to Matt!

This blog is protected by video surveillance

I should have posted this a couple weeks or so ago, but I've got a spare minute so here it is: a spot for The New York Times Book Review. It's for Security, by Gina Wohlsdorf, a slasher type mystery thriller about two killers that stalk their victims at a swanky hotel. What makes this story a bit different is that it's told from the perspective of the hotel's ubiquitous security cameras.

The image is pretty small, so the instructions were to keep it simple and graphic. I've always liked those "security camera in use" signs outside convenience stores, and decided to modify the image a bit. It was a fun little piece to do. Read the review here. Thank you to Matt Dorfman, my AD on this! More stuff to come when I know the publications are out...

You can take the boy out of Montana...

I've been meaning to post this for a few days. A recent illustration for the NY Times Book Review, for Boris Fishman's new novel Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo. The book centers on married couple Maya and Alex, immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus, respectively. Their son Max, who was adopted by the couple as a baby, begins to show strange, animal-like behavior. The three end up on a journey to Montana, Max's birthplace, to seek out the reason for his feral affectations.

Max isn't the only one with persistent bonds to his birthplace. As Cathleen Schine's review explains: "The Russian-speaking Jewish refugees (Maya and Alex, as well as Alex's parents)... have lost the Old Country twice, yet they are never quite free of it." I wanted to highlight the way that people remain connected to their origins. No matter where they end up, there often remains something to tether them to their beginnings. Read the review here, or better yet, get a copy of the book. Thank you to Matt Dorfman, my AD on this one!

Head over heels for The Atlantic

I've been looking forward to posting about this for a while now, but have been pretty busy. I have a piece in the current issue of The Atlantic (the September issue), for Caleb Crain's book review of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Purity. I always love doing book review illustrations, and the fact that it was for the work of such a talented writer was the cherry on top.

 I'm not going to go into a long description of the plot- you can pick up a copy and read the review, or better yet, the actual book- but suffice to say it revolves around a 23 year-old woman named Purity, or Pip for short. Pip doesn't know much about where she comes from: who her father is, or even her mother's real name. In order to find out who she is, she gets involved with a clearinghouse for internet leaks, thinking that the web must surely have some answers. It's on this journey of self-discovery that she apparently runs into trouble. As Crain explains, "Franzen has always been fond of putting his characters into a psychic distress so disorienting that they make decisions that topple them into even greater psychic distress." There are multiple mentions in the review of characters seeming to "fall" or "topple" into these situations, and continuing to plunge, "like Wile E. Coyote ricocheting down the sides of a canyon..." I felt that showing the character in some phase of tumbling was the way to go, and the AD agreed.

I also made a wider version for the website, which is also how it's displayed on my site:

This was a lot of fun to work on. Thanks so much to Lauren!
 

Eraserhead

In heaven, everything is fine. This here piece was out in the Sunday Boston Globe a couple weeks back. It's for the review of the new Jesse Ball book, "A Cure For Suicide." Not quite a dystopian novel, but the story features a society that is definitely alien to us. War and prisons have been eradicated, but suicide still persists. The society's answer is a process that completely erases the suicidal's memory. Not just the memories that involve the reasons for the individual wanting to take his/her life, but clears the whole slate. Much like a baby, the individual must then re-learn how to talk, eat, and function as a person.

And here's the page from the Sunday Globe:

 
Thank you to Greg, my AD on this!

In Putin's Russia, stock market crashes YOU

Here's another book review illustration, this time on Bill Browder's Red Notice. It ran in this past weekend's Sunday Globe.

The book is the true story of Browder's experiences in Russia, after renouncing his American citizenship and traveling to Eastern Europe and Russia after the Berlin Wall fell, and once public (state-owned) services, infrastructure, and resources were being gobbled up by oligarchs, creating a huge windfall of moolah for a select few. Luckily for Browder, he was able to take advantage of some of this free-market frenzy, and after starting Hermitage Capital, rode the tumultuous wave of the stock market in Moscow, starting with $25 million, climbing to $1 billion, crashing a couple times, and ending back on top with $4.5 billion. But so this is where the story gets interesting, as Browder is detained, expelled from Russia, and basically stripped of his own company, apparently at the behest of Vladimir Putin himself. He's even convicted in absentia of tax evasion. When he tries to fight back, his tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is arrested, and later found beaten to death in his cell. The book is billed as a high-drama story of the ruthless corruption present in Putin's Russia, as well as Browder's crusade for justice- not only for the financial persecution he suffered, but for Magnitsky's murder as well. 

My sketches started off with fairly straight forward portraits of Putin, but I tried playing with a fever chart, and noticed how a couple crashes in the market could easily become bloody fangs on the ex-KGB man. Thank you to my AD, Kim! Here's the review.

Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

I usually try (unsuccessfully) to come up with a clever title for my blog posts, but I've done a couple book reviews recently for novels with such cool titles that I decided to feature the book titles instead. Case in point: Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves, by Carolyn Chute. What a sweet title!

This was another review in the Boston Globe, in this past Sunday's paper. As with my post for The Laughing Monsters, I'd advise you to read the review, or better yet, the actual book, but I'll try to give a short description. The book takes place in rural Maine, in the fictional town of Egypt. Ivy Morelli, a reporter for the local paper, is investigating a strange and secretive compound called the Settlement. "It’s a cult, the residents whisper. There are pregnant child brides and child abuse, and even worse, a violent militia is stockpiling weapons, and who knows to what end? But are the stories true?" The group maintains that their aim is to provide an alternative community to the poor and outcast, away from the greed and lust for power in greater society. The charismatic leader Gordon St. Onge seems to convince Ivy that all is well, and she joins the Settlement. But a 15-year-old girl named Bree joins the group as well, and as the review explains, "It’s Bree who will cause a tsunami among the Settlement and the outsiders, one that will change just about everything for just about everyone — and not always in the best of all possible ways."

With my original set of sketches, I wanted to reference the stockpiling of weapons, but also the antagonistic stance of the Settlement toward the greed of society. In #1 and #3 I was trying to show Gordon's relationship with the women in the group- he apparently had twenty-odd wives constantly following him around.

 The editor felt it was too geared toward the "militia" themes, but also wanted the texture of the setting to come through in the illustration. Dirt roads, old wood, etc. I thought it might be a good solution to show the texture as planks of wood for a fence or wall around the compound, leaving peepholes exposing themes from the story: stockpiling weapons, Gordon's apparent stance toward society, and the red-haired Bree. It allows for multiple elements of the novel to be shown, without getting too complex, and implies the secrecy and enigmatic nature of the Settlement. The varying styles of collage also helped to connect to the novel, because it's constructed through multiple narrators, including not only the human characters, but Television, Mammon, and even aliens. Based on this review, and others, it sounds like a great book. Thank you to Kim for the assignment!

The Laughing Monsters

I was commissioned last week to do an illustration for the book review of The Laughing Monsters, by Denis Johnson. The piece appeared in the Boston Globe over the weekend. I only got a few lines from the review, so I had to find other reviews and synopses of the novel to get a clearer picture of what the book was really about. I won't go too far in depth (better to read the actual review, or better yet, read the book), but basically the main character, Roland Nair, works for NATO and is sent into West Africa to locate an old anti-terrorism buddy of his, Michael Adriko. The review describes Adriko thusly: "A native of Congo who has ended up affiliated with the US Army by way of Ghana, Michael is a figure cloaked in so many lies, mysteries, and identities that the novel makes little effort to render him 'believably...'" From what I could gather reading as many reviews as I could find, the main themes of the novel seemed to be ever-changing loyalties, enigmatic identities, and the relationship between these two characters- one driven by greed and power, the other seemingly nothing more than a thirst for chaos. I had one firm idea hit me early on, and turned in only one sketch, however I was pretty confident it would work. Luckily it was well received and I was able to proceed with the final:

Following along with the themes I could surmise, I wanted the identity of the figure to be obscured- it also worked out that scribbling over the face with a black pen looked like a ski mask/balaclava. The characters make their money in this world of rebels and terrorists, not always in opposition to them. The Boston Globe review can be found here.

(I did not make the cover illustration above) It seems like a really intense and intriguing novel, and the illustration was a lot of fun to work on. Thank you to Kim, the AD on this!

NY Times Book Review

Here's the NY Times Book Review illustration I finished a couple weeks ago. I was pleasantly surprised to get an email from Nicholas Blechman for another job, shortly after I had turned in my first piece for the Book Review (previous post). This one was for the book The Night Train by Clyde Edgerton, a story about two best friends and aspiring musicians, one white, one black, in Civil Rights era North Carolina.



It's always hard to get good color on newsprint, but for what it's worth, it looks really nice online here. Thanks again, Nicholas and Alicia!

As promised...

Here is the illustration I finished before we left on vacation, for Nicholas Blechman at the New York Times Book Review. It was for a review of Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell. Illustrating book reviews are always a fun challenge. This one involved listening to lots of Neil Young, which wasn't a challenge at all. "Down by the River" seemed especially appropriate.



Thank you, Nicholas! Also coming soon... another piece for the Book Review (which involved listening to some Thelonious Monk)!

New Op-Ed piece for L.A. Times

This piece was finished last week for Wes at the L.A. Times, for the Sunday Op-Ed. It accompanied several stories by various authors writing about books: from the ones they had finally gotten around to reading, to the novels they will probably never finish.


It was awesome working with Wes again. The stories were online, but now I can't seem to find them. If I end up locating the page, I'll return the link.