Exclusive Cover Reveal of SHAMEWRECK by Peggy Shinner

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Shamewreck by Peggy Shinner, which will be published on February 9, 2027 by Mad Creek Books. You can pre-order your copy here.

For readers of Eula Biss and Cathy Park Hong, essays that knit cultural criticism, social history, and personal experience to excavate the entanglements of shame, power, language, and identity.

In Shamewreck, Peggy Shinner interrogates the entanglement of shame and language, casting shame as a moral force, a conscience-beast, an umpire, the fellow who awaits when you come home. These essays grapple with the nuclear bombing of Bikini Atoll and the emergence, four days later, of the bikini in Paris; the link between property and personhood and what it means to die without possessions; the mutability of language and how shamefaced once meant “modest and bashful,” before morphing into the opposite, “abashed and ashamed”; how talkative women were thought to be sloppy women, like Eve (loose of mouth and morals); how occupation once meant “heterosexual intercourse” and now means “military invasion.” Parsing the dark undercurrents of popular culture alongside her own experiences as a queer woman, Shinner exhorts us to abandon willful unseeing and consider the legacies of language. Take a look, she urges, you can buy a new car in 21st century America and for your money get two masters and a slave key. Shamewreck complicates our notions of shame and shamelessness and rescues them from the refuse pile, reclaiming shame as a potent moral adjudicator.

Here is the cover, designed by Charles Brock:

Peggy Shinner: Shamewreck is, in many ways, an invitation to look at the unsightly or, to put it another way, the unseen, and make it visible. What would such a book look like? There were three elements I was sure of: strong type, saturated color, and no human figures. I wanted to steer clear of the tired visual tropes of shame: head bowed, shoulders slumped, gaze averted. So I had a feel for the cover, but not a specific image. At the last minute I sent my editor a photo of a bombed US naval ship at Bikini Atoll, referencing one of the essays in the book. An actual, irradiated shipwreck. Then the prestidigitation, out of sight, out of my sight, happened. Soon the cover arrived. Not the ship I sent but another ship, on its side, mostly submerged, nose up and precariously tilted, heading toward the bottom, completely unanchored. Then and now I was astounded. I love the cover for its somewhat queasy green color (shame can be queasy-making); the visual and aural rhyming of shipwreck/shamewreck, both ship and shame upended; the water, too, upended, along the whole length of the spine; the horizontal bands of deep purple, the encapsulated lowercase typography in an astonishing pink, an explosion of color and the centerpiece, pinning it all down. The whole disturbing disturbance. I’m grateful to Charles Brock for his vision and his palette and how the cover surprises me every time I look at it.

Charles Brock: A shipwreck was suggested as a possible image for the cover. There was concern that the cover might look like a history book with a ship on the cover. So the choice was made to rotate the image and use a halftone effect so that it had more of a graphic feel as opposed to a photo. The author likes strong type. I took Barbara Kruger as inspiration and used Futura Bold Oblique for the cover type. I think the graphic treatment on the image, combined with the bold type and unconventional colors work well to communicate that Shamewreck is not a history book.