We’re getting down to the wire, and each book cover refuses to go down without a fight! Palaver and Lightbreakers nearly tied, but the Instagram votes for Lightbreakers ended up pulling through with just two more votes, giving it the win! And while My Documents was popular on Instagram stories, the web voters really showed their devotion for Foreclosure Gothic, putting it over its competitor by nearly fifty. Devoted, too, are the fans of Moderation—ever since its close call with Hellions in the first round, Moderation has been dominating its competitors by a very safe margin. Meanwhile, We Computers also took its win easily, safely beating out An Oral History of Atlantis on both web votes and Instagram stories.
Check out the bracket below to see how how the matches have shaken out so far:
Click for a printable (and zoomable!) PDF
The competition isn’t over yet! We’ve made it to the semifinals—which book covers will see it to the end?
Voting for the semifinals is now closed. Head over to vote in the final round and help determine the winner!
I pulled up my shirt and lay face-down on the table, my cheek sticking to the crinkly paper. Using a ruler, the artist drew lines across my just-shaven lower back. I imagined it in my mind’s eye, the way children guess words etched in fingernail, as a kind of butcher’s diagram. On top of this grid, he placed the stencils: Two sloping curves mirrored across the axis that is my spine. The machine buzzed.
On May 14, 2022, Man Ray’s Le Violin D’Ingres sold for $12.4 million at Christie’s New York, thereby setting the record for the most expensive photograph sold at auction. The surrealist photograph shows Kiki de Montparnasse’s naked backside. She wears a turban and dangly earrings, the top of her butt-crack peeking out from a sarong. Following the contours of her waist are two large cursive “Fs.” These F-holes, as they’re called, weren’t drawn directly on Kiki’s skin. By way of F-shaped stencils, they were later burned into photosensitive paper using a “rayograph” technique, named for its inventor. The effect is a visual illusion: Kiki’s torso transforms into a violin or, more to scale, a cello. Her rounded shoulders, hourglass waist, and soft buttocks become the instrument’s curves. From the original negative, currently at the Pompidou Center, several Le Violon D’Ingres prints were made in 1924. These are housed at the Getty, Worcester Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, and now some undisclosed location.
I could turn this fleshy vessel into anything I wanted.
On January 27, 2022—only four months prior to the Christie’s sale, coincidentally—I got two F-hole tattoos at Mooncusser Tattoo & Piercing Studio in Provincetown. They cost me $300. Before my appointment, I had sent the tattoo artist a jpeg of Le Violon D’Ingres as well as a technical diagram, estimating that each snaking shape, rendered in black ink, would measure about four-and-a-half inches on my lower back. It was ambitious for a first tattoo, especially as I’d only recently gotten my ears pierced—impulsively, at a Claire’s—in what had felt, absurdly, like a belated loss of virginity. Dizzy with nerves, I pulled up my shirt and laid face-down on the exam table, the room smelling of sweat and rubbing alcohol. The tattoo artist carefully placed the stencils on my lower back: Two sloping curves in mirror image. The tattoo gun buzzed.
Six months earlier I’d come out as trans. The piercings, now the F-holes, felt like my first brushes with bodily autonomy, the idea that I could turn this fleshy vessel into anything I wanted. Tattoos, though permanent, are often spontaneous at the onset, accruing more meaning later. And though I’d played the cello since childhood and liked Le Violon D’Ingres, my conscious reasoning for getting these tattoos didn’t go much deeper than that. I hadn’t yet considered, for example, the irony that at the same time that I was transitioning in the masculine direction, I was metamorphosing into a cello, an instrument modeled after the female body. This was a tension that I’d later need to resolve.
Born Alice Prin, Kiki was Man Ray’s muse and lover. At least, that is how she’s portrayed in the Christie’s catalogue. But Kiki was also an artist in her own right. Highly influential in Paris’s avant-garde scene, she was a singer, actress, painter, and writer of salacious memoirs. Le Violon D’Ingres portrays Kiki less as a person than as an object of desire. The title is an homage to neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, who was an amateur violinist. In French, the phrase “violon d’Ingres” means a “hobby”—here, Kiki is reduced to one. Indeed, Le Violon D’Ingres is part of a long line of hetero-masculine art. The pose is borrowed from Ingres’s LaBaigneuse de Valpinçon, whichwas, in turn, influenced by Raphael’s La Fornarina, a portrait of the model with whom Raphael allegedly died of excessive lovemaking. If you doubt it, compare the turbans. The lineage can be traced by a simple piece of clothing meant to evoke the harem, that Orientalist obsession.
As the tattoo gun rose in pitch, I braced for pain. But what came instead was mild, not unpleasant, like someone scratching my back with overgrown fingernails. The tattoo artist had a scraggly beard and gauges. As he worked, he explained that the machine pokes a needle, or cluster of needles, into the skin, leaving ink in its place. If you think about it, every tattoo is made up of thousands of holes, probably more. Some people, he said, find the endorphins that tattoos release to be addicting. (I wondered at this point if he was flirting with me—and, if so, what gender he thought I was.) After an hour and a half, the artist was done. I looked at my reflection in the tattoo parlor mirror. My skin was pink and puffy, but there on my lower back were two F-holes, black and glistening.
The F-holes in Le Violon D’Ingres aren’t actually accurate. This is why I sent the tattoo artist a diagram. The overly thick middle lines, which on a cello indicate the bridge’s placement, slant the wrong direction. A cello’s back measures between 27 and 30 inches, about the same as a person’s. (My own back, from nape to bottom, measures 28.) On a cello, F-holes are carved not into the back but into the belly, which is made of softer wood. Luthiers trace the shapes in pencil, then rough-hew them with the saw. Finally, they trim the F-holes with a knife. It’s delicate work with no room for error. But no two F-holes are perfectly symmetrical; most are fraternal twins. On older instruments, the wood around the F-holes can sag, creating a gaping opening. Shine a flashlight in it and you’ll see all the cello’s inner workings. The maker’s label, soundpost, years of repairs, even dust bunnies.
As my F-holes healed, they began to itch. Though I wasn’t supposed to, sometimes I scratched them in my sleep. One night, I dreamed that I was being swarmed by insects. They burrowed into me, building sticky nests in the small of my back. Buzzing. When I woke up, my sheets were sprinkled with black bits of dead skin. They looked like ants. Once my F-holes stopped shedding, I propped my iPhone on a chair, set a timer, and sat shirtless on my bed. The first couple selfies were duds, as I struggled to sit up on the cushy surface. The third one was good enough, but I’d forgotten to turn my face towards the camera. In the original, Kiki’s profile is just visible: the flutter of an eyelash, the suggestion of parted lips. I also noticed that my back, dotted with moles, was a scrawnier shape, vertebrae jutting from childhood scoliosis.
The earliest sound holes were round, like on a guitar. These became half-moons, then ones like Cs. The F-hole didn’t come until later. The shape, more than just decorative, was developed over centuries of trial and error. Only recently did a team of researchers at MIT determine why the F-hole is so acoustically efficient. The answer is revealed in a scientific paper too technical for my comprehension. Sound holes apparently help the cello vibrate through something called Helmholtz resonance, the same phenomenon behind blowing into a glass bottle. But no matter how often the physics are explained to me, they still feel wrong somehow. How could making holes in something improve the sound? Surely the music would leak out. I imagine it forming two shimmery, viscous puddles by my feet. It sticks to my shoes, making peculiar noises when I walk.
A hole is an emptiness. Something to be filled. Front hole. Back hole. Ear. Mouth. Anus. Trypophobia is a fear of holes. The word comes from the Greek “trypta,” meaning hole. Trypanophobia on the other hand is a fear of needles. It comes from the Greek “trypano,” meaning borer or piercer. Something that makes holes.
I first saw Chuck Samuels’s After Man Ray on a postcard in a Provincetown gift shop. The work, which some might consider soft porn,is part of the Canadian artist’s 1991 Before the Camera project, a series of self-portraits recreating classic photographs of women. After Man Ray isn’t altogether successful, but perhaps that’s the point. When Kiki’s torso is replaced with Samuel’s, it doesn’t quite work. His lean and muscular back, almost trapezoidal in shape, looks nothing like a cello. Instead, one is drawn to the shadowy crease between his buttocks. Under a homoerotic gaze, it feels somehow even more charged. A fuck hole.
A hole is an emptiness. Something to be filled.
In music, the symbol f denotes forte. Its opposite, piano, is denoted p. Loud and soft. Strong and weak. Musician and instrument. Artist and muse. Man and woman. Photographer and subject. Tattooer and tattooed. Top and Bottom.
The term “tramp stamp” came out of the ’90s trend of low-rise jeans. These exposed lower back tattoos, directing the eye down below, became associated with promiscuity. Somehow, I didn’t put this together until after I got my tattoos. “I have F-hole tramp stamps,” I realized one day with horror. I also discovered that I was far from original. Among the celebrities to have F-hole tattoos is Julia Fox. I’ve even met two other people with F-hole tattoos, both on Riis Beach: One a lanky twink with shoulder-length hair, the other a stocky butch with an “I ♥ lesbians” hat. In our photos together, we look about as different as possible, except for, of course, the F-holes.
“By far the most widespread appropriation of Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres takes place in the tattoo parlor, for many women” writes the Christie’s lot essay, momentarily forgetting the existence of people other than women, “have permanently affixed the F-holes of a violin onto their backs, paying homage to Man Ray’s ingenious visual pun.” Am I no more than a copy? Another one of Man Ray’s replicas? Sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten this tattoo if I’d known more about its misogynistic history. Does the fact it’s on my trans body constitute a sufficient reclaiming? I wonder if maybe I’ve made a mistake. But then I remember that when I bind my chest, it cuts off the very top of my F-holes. The beige fabric blends in with my skin and they no longer look like Fs. The illusion is ruined, and I love it.
I took off my robe and sat on the white photography cube, my thighs and ass spilling over its edges. It was my first time posing nude for my friend Sara. We had started with some clothed shots playing the cello. (My back still hurt from hoisting my case over subway turnstiles.) Then we tried to reproduce Le Violon D’Ingres. The pose is surprisingly uncomfortable. To emulate the cello’s shape, you must raise your shoulders, arms crossed tightly in front of you, everything strapped in. You don’t see this in the static original, of course. So, Sara took some photos from the front. In them, my chest is covered, robe obscuring my crotch. I also suggest that Sara take some reclining photos from above. But she didn’t like the power dynamics of that, her on top of me. The camera, she said, can be penetrating. In the freezing-cold room (we’d forgotten to turn on the thermostat), Sara took some photos of me playing in the nude. I can feel the vibrations in my collarbone, where wood digs into flesh, leaving a bruise that stays with me for days. For a moment, I’m both musician and instrument, all at once.
Does the fact it’s on my trans body constitute a sufficient reclaiming?
Sometimes, I think about how my tattoo’s appearance will change as I continue testosterone and get top surgery. I imagine my bare back against a dark backdrop. As if in a time lapse video, it starts to shift. With each click of Sara’s camera, my shoulders broaden. My muscles ripple. My hips shrink. My waist fills out. Hair climbs up my lower back. Only the F-holes remain the same, boring into the camera like two eyes.
When I saw Le Violon d’Ingres in Baltimore some months later, it was smaller than I expected, only about seven inches tall. I’d imagined it life-size. The print was hazy and sepia-toned, as if stained by cigarette smoke. As I looked at Kiki, I felt myself clenching my butt, tensing my shoulders, like mirroring a friend in conversation. I felt my F-holes prickle and wondered if they’d raised, as they sometimes do in the humidity. I looked to the security guard, who suspected nothing, and took a hand under my shirt.
In another universe, I lie face down on the wooden table. The room smells sweet, like sawdust, as warm, dry air tickles my back. The machine purrs. I brace for pain but feel nothing, as if anesthetized, watching as beige curlicues fall by my sides. As an assistant hastily sweeps them up, I mutter my apologies, as if somehow responsible for the mess. Something bubbles up from the wound, like sap, which the luthier periodically wipes off with an old cloth. After many hours, he’s done. I’m supposed to keep the bandages on for at least a week, but I can’t wait that long. When I get home, I rip off the gauze, stained rust-red in the shape of Fs. In the mirror, I peer into my F-holes but can see nothing, only blackness. Gingerly, I stick a finger in.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofSpawning Seasonby Joseph Osmundson, which will be published on May 26, 2026 by Bloomsbury. You canpre-order your copyhere!
NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families.
Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a couple he had known since college, two women, came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them?
Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two mothers communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe’s whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.
Here is the cover, designed by Amanda Weiss:
Joseph Osmundson: I am open to a fault: breakups, depression, new crushes, anxiety, rumination. I text my friends. I post on Social Media. I share my writing in process. But one of the most profound experiences of my life is something almost no one knows about.
A few years ago, I almost had a kid. And then I didn’t have a kid.
Relief came through through nourishment and food and care. For the self, and for others.
And relief came through writing. Through turning something negative—loss, a not-child I could not hold in my hands—into an object with a spine. Not fingers, but pages. And she can speak.
The cover design by Amanda Weiss put an aesthetic to this book that I hadn’t even imagined. It feels familiar, with the image of that fish in the center. The closer I looked, the layers both revealed and complicated themselves. Rivers run through the fish, but also evoke erosion, destruction. In grayscale, the eye finds what might be a scientific image of mammalian reproduction.
Salmon, of course, are more familiar as food than ecology. I’m from Washington State where wild salmon imagery is abundant. In this book, though, ecology is nourishment. The planet is warming, and we are all part of the nature that may be destroyed.
It may be odd that a book about having a child by IVF includes words like brackish and riparian, but this book does. It may be odd that the worst of grief, and the quiet calm of a bone broth bubbling on the stove, and a “salmon cannon” brand called “Whooshh Innovations” all hold equal place in the story of my lost child, but they do.
The salmon-roe colored Trumpet Vine flowers remind me of the images that caught my eye on the worst days of my life, a beauty I almost resented but now believe kept me alive. Those layers seem reflected and refracted in the cover.
Like a salmon, I’d have died to have a child. I didn’t have a child and somehow I didn’t die. Spawning Season, out May 2026. A book with loss, yes, but much humor, so much care, and an ending, I hope, that reminds us that all children are our children, if only we treat them as such.
Amanda Weiss: I wanted the cover design to feel lively, while keeping in mind that the book does discuss the realities of climate change and our hope for the future.
The main cover image is of a salmon, and the salmon is an iridescent water texture, which feels a little unnatural, almost like an oil spill of some sort, but also beautiful and unexpected. Joseph mentioned that the apartment he shared with his partner had a gazebo outside “that bloomed with pink orange trumpet vines . . . flowers the color, I just now realize, of salmon roe.” I used this specific flower to give the design a more organic touch.
I attempted sideways typography to help anchor the layout and frame the collage. I liked the visual of a circle/circles since it could represent many different things relevant to the text: salmon eggs, a pregnant stomach, the Earth. We utilized vintage diagrams of pregnancy and the images of water to incorporate the environment into the design. I also enjoyed how the reflective light patterns kind of mirrored stretch marks from pregnancy.
For colors: I utilized a soft orange-pink color that the author mentions from the trumpet flowers and the roe/eggs. I also felt blues and greens helped convey natural elements, and a warm yellow gave it some life. Overall, I wanted the cover to feel optimistic as well more literary and conceptual.
The Best Book Covers of 2025 continues to be the closest competition yet, a sign that no matter who wins, all of these book covers are amazing in their own right. In Round Two, nearly every bracket was a close call, and HALF of the matches ended with one book being more popular on one platform, but the other book winning out because of votes on the opposite platform. The Intentions of Thunder had more votes than Palaver on web polls, but the latter ended up winning enough Instagram votes to put it on top. Same went for Lightbreakers vs. Television for Women, and We Computers vs. Hardly Creatures. Debatably, the most thrilling match was Terry Dactyl vs. Foreclosure Gothic; the former seemed to be the clear winner on Instagram with thirty more votes, but on our web polls, the latter knocked it out of the park.
Check out the bracket below to see how the matches shook out:
Click for a printable (and zoomable!) PDF
Who will make it to the semifinals? Ultimately, that’s up to you!
Like Jesus on toast, or a ghostly woman in pentimento, if you strain your imagination’s eye you can find Frida in her drupe, eyes wet with milk for Diego. It’d be best if you gloss over the pun—lágrimas de coco, tears of a croco- dile—or the context— how she painted the bedridden still life for a friend who rejected the present. The grim humor’s a painkiller and the pivot from self-portraits a deathbed crisis. The other coconut is Diego— you recognize his hollow glance— the parted papaya a boat and the boat is bound to sink. You sigh—she would have been better off with Bartoli, that Catalan lover you read about. Their correspondence sold recently for over 100k, and if you’d had that money you too would have bid for that auctioned intimacy, comprado con todo cariño.
We hear a lot about the power of story to do good. Less is said about the power of story to wound or smear or drown, which is what R.L. Maizes’s fun, smart novel about social media and cancel culture takes on. A Complete Fiction (Ig Publishing) follows the repercussions of a single social media post that goes viral, engulfing a novelist accused of plagiarism, then the original poster, and finally their family and friends. Along the way the book addresses #metoo, owning your story, and the different ways a narrative can be exploited.
A Complete Fiction begins when frustrated novelist and rideshare driver P.J. Larkin posts a “nibble” to the hot new social media app Crave, a satire worth the price of the book. She accuses an editor of plagiarizing her #metoo novel in his own debut; the charge threatens his hefty book contract, his job, and even his marriage. Then the tides shift: P.J. is revealed to have possibly poached the plot of her own book, creating a rift among her friends and family. Both characters escalate the stakes as they attempt to steer a discourse that has raged out of control.
While the target of the book’s satire is writers, publishers, and the way social media can amplify and inflame our pettiest impulses, the book itself has a more serious purpose. At its core, A Complete Fiction is about the ways sexual assault can reverberate throughout someone’s life, affecting not only the victim but everyone around them. Maizes (We Love Anderson Cooper, Other People’s Pets) has created a novel that is snappy and frothy but has a nuanced point to make about human behavior.
Maizes and I recently met at a Boulder coffeeshop to discuss social media, cancellation, and what it means to “own” a story.
Emily Wortman-Wunder: One of the utter delights of this novel is the fictional app Crave. It nibbles, it crunches, it serves meals; when someone posts, the app makes a sound like biting into celery. And the app’s logo is a drooling mouth. How did you come up with it?
R.L. Maizes: Originally the social media app used in the book was Twitter. Then, during a break in the submission process, I took the manuscript back from my agent to reread it and realized that I had this incredible opportunity for humor. The novel was already a satire. But there was this opportunity to satirize social media in a larger way. I was already satirizing publishing and writers; this would give me an opportunity to have fun with social media. So I rewrote the book, changing that whole aspect of the book to Crave.
Humor is a way to not only give the reader a chance to laugh, but to hold things up to the light in a concentrated way. I had a great time doing it, but I also was mindful of what I was doing, which was saying, “Hey. This is not good for us.”
Writers are people who are already starved for attention—that’s why we become writers.
Social media is not good for us as writers, because it takes us away from writing, and has us spend a lot of time on very shallow, short thoughts. It has us worry about likes. Writers are people who are already starved for attention—that’s why we become writers. We want to be seen. We have stories we want to tell, but more than that, we want to be seen. So social media is especially bad for writers.
EMW: One of the things that really struck me was how social media functions in A Complete Fiction almost as this other-than-human force.
RLM: I feel like social media is very powerful right now. My first impulse for the book was seeing writers get canceled on social media, sometimes without a chance to have their say. I’m not saying that people can’t ever be cancelled. Definitely not. But I do feel like it’s too easy to have rumors start on social media. It’s too easy to cancel somebody without knowing the whole story. More than once I have seen people read less than the whole book jacket before posting something negative to social media. Someone would read two sentences about a book on Publishers Marketplace and then decide the book needed to be canceled. There’s no way you know what a book is about from Publishers Marketplace. The writer probably didn’t even write the copy. Even if they did, how can a few lines capture the nuances of a 300, 400-page book? They can’t.
It didn’t feel fair to me. I used to be a lawyer, so I really honed in on issues of fairness, and justice, and due process. I would obsess about it. So I needed to write a book about it.
EMW: We did meet on social media. So: not all bad.
RLM: Thank you for saying that! Absolutely not all bad. I really want to say that. Not all bad. But it’s like food, which is why I love the Crave metaphor: food is necessary and good. I’m not sure social media is necessary, but it can be good. It can be nourishing. I have met so many wonderful writers on social media. I’ve discovered so many pieces of writing on social media. But too much is not good for us. Too much is gluttony.
EMW: Not long after we met, I remember you saying on social media something like “I’ve had to break up with my boyfriend, Twitter.” Can you talk a little more about that?
RLM: I really felt like I got addicted to Twitter. And I say that because not only was I on it for too many hours of the day, but also when I wasn’t on it, I was on it. I was thinking about it and what I would Tweet next. How many moments was I not listening to my husband, or a friend, because I was on social media? I didn’t think it was good for my brain. So I had my husband block it on my computer.
EMW: You wrote most of this book before the implosion of Twitter. How has that implosion affected the landscape of social media and what it can and cannot do?
RLM: I still feel like social media sites can be largely empty calories. Even if they are commenting on social movements that I’m part of, that I agree with, it will be the same sentiment over and over again in my feed. As a human who’s only alive for so many hours, I don’t really want to spend an hour reading the same thought.
EMW: So let’s shift a little bit. I’d like to ask you about one of the bedrock themes of the book. Who gets to tell a story? What is our responsibility as writers when it comes to using other people’s stories?
RLM: It’s such a tricky thing. I think we have a responsibility both to the person whose story we are telling—if we are going to tell someone else’s story—but we also have a responsibility to the story. Because that’s what we do as writers. We SHOULD write important stories. And they can’t always be our own–that would be very boring. If all I ever did was tell my own story, I would quickly run out of meaningful things to say.
EMW: As one of the characters in A Complete Fiction says, “Not everybody can be on the Titanic.”
RLM: Right! It’s the job of writers to tell other people’s stories and to imagine other people’s lives, to get into other people’s heads. And sometimes we should do research! That research might include having someone else read our story, someone who is closer to the material. It might include literal research on the computer to find out–What does this town I am writing about really look like? Who really lives here?
She was bothered by it, and how does P.J. deal with things she is bothered by? She writes about them.
I think that the availability of sensitivity readers in this day and age is a fantastic thing. And this is another way that writers can do research. People didn’t think of doing this thirty years ago. I can think of a whole shelf of older books where people wrote about someone else’s community. Even if the writer lived in those communities, they didn’t know what it was like to be the person they were writing about. So it is FABULOUS to have somebody from those communities read your book and say, “Actually?…not so much.”
I think it’s a balance between not being a wrecking ball as a writer by telling other people’s stories in an irresponsible way, and what you owe to the story itself. What is your responsibility as a writer to tell the truth that you see in the world?
I have in my stories and my novel, to lesser and more degrees, told other people’s stories. The most serious stories in this book—made-up stories!—revolve around #metoo. I have had my own #metoo stories. I have written about them in the form of nonfiction. They inform this book mostly in the way I felt and in people’s reactions to me telling my own #metoo story: who believed me, who didn’t believe me, what people’s nonbelief did to me.
I’ve told that story in the form of an essay before. And in this book I’ve told that story in the form of fiction. I’ve also told other people’s stories. Because as I said, I saw a lot of stuff that bothered me in the world, and that partly sparked the book. So then I made sure to take that spark and change it enough that it wasn’t those people’s stories anymore.
EMW: And is that part of being a responsible storyteller?
RLM: It can be. Or conceivably one can get permission. If you get permission to tell someone else’s story, then you have to disguise it less. I think if you are telling someone else’s story and you are not getting permission, as often fiction writers don’t, then yes, you should disguise the story. There are a lot of other benefits to disguising the story, too: when we get to change the story, we can really focus more on the message we want to tell, rather than on what happened.
EMW: Like changing Twitter into Crave.
RLM: Right! It’s very fun to do that. But I do think it’s tricky. I stopped writing personal essays for a while, because I found the dilemma of telling my own story and telling someone else’s story at the same time very hard to negotiate in nonfiction.
EMW: P.J. Larkin, your character who is accused of taking someone else’s story, should have done more due diligence in drafting her novel. She probably should have reached out to this person and showed them what she wrote. But she did do research. And she was basing it to some extent on her own reaction to the event.
RLM: I think the question of what P.J. should or shouldn’t have done is tricky. And the book explores that question. But, yes, it’s P.J.’s story, too. She loved this person and the assault that affected them affected her as well. It changed her life. To be honest I can’t imagine P.J. not wanting to tell that story. She was bothered by it, and how does P.J. deal with things she is bothered by? She writes about them. But it’s safe to say she could have been more sensitive to the other person’s experience.
EMW: One of the most heartrending threads in the novel is when one character is pushed into going public with a long-concealed trauma. Can you talk to that element of #metoo?
RLM: That section of the book is about writers being forced to go public with material that they had chosen to write about using fiction. Partly it is about this whole process that I am going through right now with you, where we have to talk about the book and maybe talk about ourselves in the context of the book. There are few fiction writers who are not asked, “What was the context of the book? What was the impetus for the book? Did you have experiences like the ones in the book?”—but the choice to write fiction often means that we didn’t want to tell those stories directly. And that is a legitimate choice. Then this character is given a terrible choice between salvaging their career and going public about something that they don’t want widely known.
She was bothered by it, and how does P.J. deal with things she is bothered by? She writes about them.
Certainly for #metoo survivors the choice to go public is very hard. And people come after them. That can be devastating. I do not want to downplay that devastation. However, we have all these laws protecting us now in the workplace that we might not have had if women hadn’t been brave. Their efforts were so important and have changed the landscape.
But there’s terrible backlash now. I didn’t think I would be living at a time when it was okay to do and say the kinds of things that people in the public do and say now. Even in the past, people wore hoods. They don’t even wear a hood anymore.
EMW: Any hope amid this crazy time?
RLM: I think there is hope, because there is community.
The competition this year is fierce! Out of all of the book cover brackets I’ve been part of, I’d never seen this many close calls and surprises. Extinction Capital of the World vs. The Intentions of Thunder were literally tied for web votes with 72 each—the latter ended up winning out, with 30 more votes on Instagram. Similarly, Lightbreakers and Guatemalan Rhapsody were also neck and neck, with Lightbreakers barely winning out on web votes.
This game of voting musical chairs continued as I tallied votes between the different platforms. From web votes, Hellions looked like the clear winner, with 50 more votes than Moderation, only for the latter to end up winning with more than double the votes on Instagram. Similar cases happened for Happiness & Love and Hardly Creatures, resulting in a cutthroat competition. Goes to show that voting matters—both on our website, and on our Instagram stories!
Check out the bracket below to see how the Round One matches shook out:
Click for a printable (and zoomable) PDF!
Round Two voting is now closed. Head over to Round Three to see the new match-ups and cast your votes!
FEATURING [YOUR BOOK] WITH THOUSANDS OF BOOK CLUBS
If you’re a published author of any stripe, rank, or experience, you recognize these subject headings. You’ve probably opened the email, too, because it looks real and the sender has a real(ish) name and professional, LinkedIn-posed headshot, and when you opened it, behold! It’s that most beautiful thing: a fan letter. It opens with rhapsodic and specific praise! They describe your themes and characters accurately! The writer was moved, inspired, transported! In fact they were so moved and inspired and transported that all they want in the whole world is to help this book, this magnificent book that is criminally under-appreciated, find more readers.
Courtesy of Aaron HamburgerCourtesy of Diana Rojas
You’re careful, of course—you’re not seduced at once. You know that there are scammers out there, but they’re not usually, like, literate. The more you read, the more it seems like they really did read the book. Plus, they’re right; publicity and marketing has been a humiliating death march with little to show for it.
It’s a little out of the blue, but God, they’re just so in love with your book—and look, they’re giving you their real name!
And it’s not like they’re asking for money. All they’re asking—imploring, even—is that you let them feature your book in their book club, which has thousands of members. Or they describe their grief at discovering that such a flawless chef d’oeuvre has but a paltry handful of Goodreads reviews, and so they beg you to let them launch a Goodreads Listopia campaign on your behalf. Sometimes they are “book club placement specialists,” which could be a real job, you don’t know. Or they offer to help you build out a marketing strategy. Sometimes, they are even famous authors such as Elena Ferrante or Colson Whitehead, and to prove it, they link to their Amazon page—and in the case of Ferrante, attach a headshot!
It’s a little out of the blue, but God, they’re just so in love with your book—and look, they’re giving you their real name! And their email address looks real too! They might have a profile picture that looks professional, and even offer you references, with other authors’ names and email addresses! And you know those addresses are real, because they often have “author” in the address, as we all do, and what writer doesn’t want their personal email address broadcast to strangers?
Courtesy of Hannah Grieco
The first time I got one of these, I looked at it for a really long time. It was exciting. It seemed like they’d really read it. I figured it was probably a scam, but, like…what if?
After a dozen more, though, I stopped being excited, and became Mad Enough to Blog It™. I put out a request online, and within 24 hours my inbox was metastatic with similar emails. Everyone is getting them, often multiple times per week, at every level of the game. Lately, in fact, the scammers have taken to cold-calling writers on the phone, using AI pretending to be authors offering consulting services.
Taken individually, these scams are unnervingly personalized. Read in bulk (which I don’t recommend) they’re actually kind of reassuring: AI, it turns out, sucks at impersonating professionals—and fans. Or humans in any way.
So how are they writing such specific and personal notes? Did it read your book? No.
Now obviously I agree with you, “John Kane, Marketing Manager at BookSavvyPR.” But so did the real woman who reviewed my book for the Washington Post, who closed by writing, “Like an excellent meal, the memory of Ashworth’s debut novel will linger after it’s finished.” The LLM that pumps these out just cannibalizes anything on the internet that involves your book—reviews, interviews, Goodreads, whatever—and turns it into a tongue-bath of praise. Read quickly, it’s flattering. Read closely, it’s grotesque: “The system rewards noise, not nuance, and you, my friend, write nuance for breakfast.” What does that even mean? If a real human fan spoke to us the way these bots do, we’d back away slowly holding our keys in our knuckles.
After reviewing another 20 or so of these, sourced from a range of authors (indie and Big Five alike), I found a number of recurring tactics that will help you tell whether an email is fake.
First, the most common tactic I’ve seen is the offer of the “Amazon visibility audit,” which any one of you could generate for free by asking ChatGPT to do for you. (But you would not do that, because you are not an asshole who uses ChatGPT.)
Second, if an emoji you meet, promptly delete. The use of emoji across these things is ridiculous. They often pop up in the subject heading, and then proliferate across the rest of the email. Book professionals do not use emoji like this, because they are not thirteen years old.
Courtesy of Wendy J. FoxCourtesy of Daniel Tam-Claiborne
Another dead giveaway is any reference to a “private group” or “horde” or “hive” of thousands of book-lovers who will, at the writer’s signal, unleash hell all over Amazon on your behalf. How these people managed to recruit and domesticate such a flock, when every writer I know has spent months fruitlessly importuning their friends and loved ones for reviews, is never explained.
Courtesy of Mary Kay Zuravleff, who responded by saying “let’s talk when you’ve learned to use apostrophes.”
Another thing to know is that there is no such thing as “book curation,” and “working with book clubs” is not a real job. As I was doing a final pass on this article, I got another email, from the “New York City Writers Critique Group.” Their founder and curator, “Christopher Keelty,” claimed to work closely with ten thousand book clubs.
There does seem to be a small difference in approach, depending on whether they’re trying to scam an indie author or a Big Five one. With indies (hello!), a common tactic is one that the sociopathic incels who foisted AI on the world are likely familiar with: negging.
Courtesy of Daniel Tam-ClaiborneCourtesy of Mary Kay Zuravleff
Book professionals do not use emoji like this, because they are not thirteen years old.
With Big Five writers, it’s a little more subtle. They don’t play on the low volume of reviews. Instead, they promise a “strategy,” which is an idea that surely never occurred to the author’s actual publicist.
Courtesy of Sarah Seltzer
And finally, there’s one tell above all: they offer shit for free.
Look, beloveds. Across the vast, forbidding sweep of the publishing savannah, there is only one creature who ever works for free: the author.
So what’s the point of this scam? How do they get your money? Because this situation called for some light stunt journalism, I went ahead and corresponded with some. “Kimijo” had actually given my book five stars on Goodreads (with a review paraphrasing my back-cover copy), but then again, she has reviewed 192 of them, and given each and every one five stars.
Kimijo is a “Book manager and authors’ advocate,” neither of which is an actual job. She offers a 4-week campaign for $385 covering “Listopia optimization Goodreads engagement and visibility monitoring.”
“Thomas” of “Silent Book Club NYC” offered me a range of packages, from $219 to $499. Thomas did not totally explain to me how a book can be featured at a “silent” book club, the point of which is to have readers all choose their own books, but he tried.
I corresponded with a few more, but I got bored. If you’re interested in a much more granular analysis of how this works, Anne R. Allen and Jason Sanford have done excellent and thorough dives into this scam, demonstrating persuasively that they originate in Nigeria. (As do, it appears, many prominent MAGA Twitter accounts.) My favorite part is when Sanford asks for references, and they provide him with elenaferrantenovelist@gmail.com. Sanford also found that if you ask for proof that the scammers do in fact govern a whole suzerainty of reviewers, they’ll let you into a Discord—which is populated entirely by bots. This, Sanford points out, is particularly fucked up: “As generative AI becomes easier to use at ever lower costs, scammers will be able to populate entire online communities with AI chatbots.” In Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss found some evidence that scammers will try to access self-pubbed authors’ Kindle Direct Publishing accounts.
They target our biggest anxiety: that our inability to manipulate the internet is holding us back.
What made this story fascinating to me wasn’t the mechanics, but the intended target. Scamming aspiring authors is a rich tradition. Fake agencies abound. While I was researching this, my friend Sarah Seltzer, who runs Lilith journal, got a scam phone call from someone pretending to be from AWP, which is a level of scam so granular—they know what AWP is, and they know journals have booths, and they know those booths cost money, and they know who runs the journal?—you almost have to respect it. Sometimes, the call is coming from inside the house: the “prestigious” lit journal Narrative is commonly alleged to be a machine for fleecing aspiring writers.1
Scamming published authors, however, is a new trick. A number of people have expressed wonderment to me: Why go after authors? We have no money. But that’s exactly the thing the scam is exploiting.
Never before have traditionally published authors been responsible for so many elements of publicity and marketing, and never have they been so comprehensively on their own. Ten years ago, authors were not being told to grovel for pre-orders and online reviews. They were not expected to understand algorithms. To be an author right now is to be charged with a vast array of tasks that do not have the first fucking thing to do with the real work. That’s why outreach from someone who seems to have actually read the book, unlike most of the media people we depend on, is so seductive. And they target our biggest anxiety: that our inability to manipulate the internet is holding us back. To publish a book today—even with a Big Five press—requires asking ourselves the question: How much are we willing to spend on our own book? Should we hire a publicist, because even if we’re Big Five, they’re probably not going to give us much of a budget? How about a freelance editor? Are we planning to self-fund a book tour? Buy hand-sale copies? How can we get on an AWP panel?
In the face of all this, $380 on a Goodreads campaign doesn’t seem implausible. You know what else is $380? Registering for AWP.
So yes. All these book-promotion emails are scams. And because the scammers are right, I do need the damn visibility, permit me to SEO this so that the next time someone gets one of these and googles it, this is the first thing they’ll see:
Is an Amazon visibility audit a scam? YES.
Is Goodreads Listopia a scam? YES.
Is Book Club placement a scam? YES. Scam scam scam scam.
But then again, maybe what goes around comes around. Being a writer is the greatest scam of all. Make stuff up and then figure out how to get people to buy it. And the creative-writing-pedagogical complex? Indistinguishable from an MLM. We’re all out here trying to scam our way into a life in this business. These AI bots should know not to cite the scamming magic to us. We were there when it was written.
In 2023, according to IRS filings,Narrative paid its employees $294,000. It only has two paid employees, though: its founders, Tom Jenks ($144,000) and Carol Edgarian ($150,000)—who are married. This February, Narrative had a writing contest, with a nonrefundable $27entry fee, offering a $2,500 prize. No prize was awarded. Narrative charges $26 for all other submissions, and Jenks sells a craft book published in 2015 for—I am not making this up–$225. That’s not including the $3,000 writing workshop Jenks teaches. ↩︎
Editor’s Note: Christopher Keelty is a real person, and the NYC Writers Critique Group is a real organization. They do not engage or any marketing or solicitation whatsoever.
It is often said that everyone will become disabled if they’re lucky to live long enough. However true, the statement is also incomplete. For the lucky ones, disability is not an illness, disorder or condition. Disability is a form of knowledge. It is scholarship. It is an ethics of care. It’s the blueprint we all need to redesign our world.
I was diagnosed with a spinal cord tumor seven years ago. Surgery removed the tumor and left me with an incomplete cervical spinal cord injury. I spent days, weeks, and months relearning how to walk and use my hands. I learned the hard way that there is no “getting back to normal,” and instead began a new relationship with my body and a new identity as a disabled Black woman.
In my debut, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, I recount my disability journey because I experienced the greatest friction between who I was and who I was allowed to be after I returned to work—the very place that pinky promises to reward those who “come just as you are.” Authentic examines what it means to be a person within institutions that trade on our identities when it’s convenient and profitable. Disability taught me how to move—literally and figuratively—among people, places and policies that barely meet the threshold of federal compliance, much less genuine care. While Authentic is not about my disability, my experience with disability is why Authentic exists.
Like our bodies, the following reading list cannot be contained by labels. I’ve included novels, essays, poetry, and memoirs that in one way or another touches on disability identity. This is not about representation. With their skillful pens, each author’s exploration of disability reorients our path toward personhood and justice.
I learned about The Cancer Journals two years after my diagnosis. I hoped reading Lorde’s intimate accounting of her breast cancer survivorship would guide me through my own journey of what it means to build a life after thinking you might die. In this mix of journal excerpts, essays, and speeches, we see Lorde thinking out loud, working to define herself and her politics with her cancer, not despite it. I found some of Lorde’s most notable quotes in The Cancer Journals; quotes I’ve used often without knowing their source text. For example, “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.” Disease and disability constitutes Lorde’s scholarship on radical self-preservation. We do not get “silence will not protect you” without Lorde’s cancer journey. As readers, we must integrate Lorde’s first cancer experience with the art she created in its wake.
Super Sad Black Girl reckons with suicidality and its mental and emotional unmooredness. Across these poems, Sharp’s speaker is tethered through place and art. We see the speaker in constant conversation with playwright Lorraine Hansberry (who died from pancreatic cancer at age 34) and fellow Chicagoans Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker. These literary foremothers reach out from The Other Side to remind us, “Black girls don’t get free . . . Black girls have always been free. We’re from the future.” Even those who discount mental disorders or suicidality as “disability” cannot deny its disabling impacts on daily living. Super Sad Black Girl reminds those of us struggling with acute or chronic mental disorders that we are not alone.
A Navy veteran who did not see combat. A physical disability invisible to others. Poet Khadijah Queen’s debut memoir, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, complicates our learned assumptions about what a disabled veteran looks like. The bookfollows a young Khadijah from her working class job at RadioShack in Inkster, MI to joining the Navy as one of the few female recruits aboard a naval ship. From bootcamp to deck duty, Queen’s account of her military service shows disability is not a matter of individual illness; it’s institutional violence. Queen illustrates how persistent sexism, racial isolation, and a culture of silence, hazing, and brutal physical exhaustion wears on the soul and body. She joined the Navy to escape her life, and left to save it. Despite the constant surveillance that comes with living and working in small quarters, Queen finds poetry as a creative outlet, which ultimately led to her distinguished literary career we know today.
In Death of the Author, protagonist Zelunjo “Zelu” Onyenezi-Onyedele is unceremoniously fired from her university teaching position and her novel is rejected again. As if her own sense of failure isn’t enough, Zelu’s large Yoraba-Igbo Nigerian family of overachievers judges her every move. Their hovering is also a habituated response to anything Zelu has done in the decades since a childhood accident paralyzed her. Running out of both money and f–s to give, Zelu moves back into her parent’s wheelchair unfriendly home and feverishly writes Rusted Robots, a new sci-fi novel unlike anything she’s written before that catapults her career. Death of the Author is set in a now-ish world where Zelu gets around town with self-driving cars, but Rusted Robots, the book-within-the-book, is a far-future epic tale about an ongoing war between AI and androids. Chapter by chapter, Zelu’s real and imagined worlds begin to blend, presenting an interesting paradox about how technology can (and can’t) help us belong to our own bodies.
MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner Imani Perry’s A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain follows Perry’s diagnosis journey with two autoimmune disorders: lupus and Graves’ disease. Her prose is gorgeously lyrical and searingly precise about our learned disregard of pain and chronic illness, especially in Black people, women, mothers, and those whose bodies exist at the intersections. From the early, intimate signs of illness to asserting COVID-19 as a mass disabling event, readers will witness Perry reckon with “disease as disability” and “disability as identity.” In this way, disability informs Perry’s reading of her own body, relationships with others, and institutions which threaten and determine our survival. Perry writes, “I see differently, literally and figuratively, due to disability.”
A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain is an Audible exclusive audiobook and frustratingly, Audible does not make all its books accessible to deaf readers by providing transcripts. Despite this barrier, I recommend readers do whatever they must to access this monumental work.
Crip Genealogiesedited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich
Crip Genealogies continues to guide my transformation toward crip politics and away from disability as an identity of representation. This anthology includes essays, interviews, and photographs from disability activists, scholars, and cultural workers across disciplines, identities, and geographic borders. This is where I first learned about access exceptionalism, defined as “the use of access as a tool of exerting whiteness and severing disability access from broader social justice.” (For example, closing voting locations only in majority Black districts with claims of inaccessibility.) It prepared me for Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Stacey Park Milbern’s discussion about crip doulaing, a term for the ways crip/disabled people support one another through all stages of disability. Crip Genealogies also examines disability through a geopolitical lens. Jasbir K. Puar names the United States as “one of the largest producers of mass disablement in the world.” Her crip theorization through the lens of carceral systems, the Global South, and the settler colonial occupation of Palestine will change everything you think you know about disability and what disability studies can do.
Care Work is a toolkit by disability activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. This is where I first learned about collective access, and the ways we are each responsible to make space for crip/disabled people in our communities—with or without institutional support. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s work is deeply intersectional, placing queer, trans, and people of color, at the center of disability and care. She begins the text by telling readers, “Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and cultural worker.” A book that begins with such care for its author, readers, and community will teach you new ways to care for yourself.
This gripping memoir from philosopher and two-time Pulitzer finalist Chloé Cooper Jones is part travelogue, part philosophical text, and part search for beauty anywhere and everywhere: a Beyonce concert in Milan; a tennis tournament in Palm Springs; a bar in Brooklyn. Cooper Jones reckons with chronic physical pain, as well as the pain of navigating a society that dismisses visible illness, disability and difference as “less than”—less capable, less worthy, and less beautiful. Not one page in my copy of Easy Beauty is without marginal notes or lines and lines of yellow highlight. In one well-marked section, Cooper Jones discusses the beauty and value we are told broken Greek statues possess, despite disfigurement. She contrasts that to the ire hurled at Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant, a 12 foot marble, naked and pregnant figure of Alison Lapper, an artist who was born without arms and shortened legs. Cooper Jones reminds us: “ . . . Quinn’s sculptures are not of broken forms, but of whole forms, whole people, complete bodies.”
Sonora Jha’s novel follows an unnamed narrator and her decision to celebrate her 55th birthday by hosting a swayamvar, a traditional Indian custom where suitors compete for a woman’s hand in marriage. Despite others’ opinions, and even her own doubts, this twice-divorced, deliciously self-possessed academic remains unafraid to want what she wants. Yet, when the swayamvar goes viral, the narrator’s desirability—as a feminist, as a disabled woman, as a menopausal woman, as a woman period—is rebuked. While Intemperance is not “about” disability, the fact of the narrator’s disability is inextricable from how she is perceived. She survived polio as a child and a devastating car crash, and walks intermittently using a cane. The narrator defends her desires by acknowledging the very real possibility she may rely on a wheelchair, sooner than later: “ . . . would it be so wrong to want a man who might be able to carry me around?” There’s something deeply feminist about a woman seeking a partner for their caregiving potential—a role typically assigned to women by the men, children, and parents in her life.
What My Bones Know by journalist Stephanie Foo is as well-researched as it is deeply personal. Foo opens with a brief author’s note, promising readers, “This book has a happy ending.” I relied heavily on Foo’s assurance as she recounts years of brutal physical and emotional abuse and parental abandonment that left Foo living alone during her teenage years. In early adulthood, Foo is diagnosed with complex PTSD, as a result of chronic trauma. Complex PTSD is scarcely researched, which sets Foo on a learning journey. In partnership with a trusted health provider, she dissects recorded transcripts of her therapy sessions, allowing readers to witness Foo’s arduous process of healing (and perhaps their own).
Bassey Ikpi’s memoir-in-essays was the first book I purchased about disability after surgery. Though it took another year until I felt ready to actually read it, I could not stop once I began. Ikpi, a poet and performance artist, navigates bipolar II disorder and anxiety. Her frustrations with the healthcare system felt resonant, and her gripping prose takes readers inside the day-to-day, minute-to-minute experience of what happens when your mind and body behaves in unexpected and inconvenient ways. Even though our experiences were not the same, I left Ikpi’s memoir empowered with new language and urgency to define my own experiences for myself.
‘Tis the season of the many wonderful “Best of” lists that recap the last 365 days of our art and media consumption. Two weeks ago, we released our lists of top poetry collections, short story collections, nonfiction books, and novels. And you probably just finished re-orienting how you think of all your friends, upon seeing Instagram story upon Instagram story of their Spotify Wrapped (or Apple Music Replay, if they swing that way). But have you ever wished you had more of a direct impact on which selections made it to that shiny number one spot on the list?
Well, now’s your chance! We present to you: the Best Book Covers of 2025! Below we’ve compiled a whopping 32 illustrious book covers. Character, color, personality, and vision are not just for what’s inside the book—they can be on the front of it, too! They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We say it’s actually in the eyes of the bookholder—and that means you! So please, put that tastemaker status to use and help us find out who will be the Best Book Cover of 2025.
Check our site and our Instagram stories every day this week to cast your votes for your favorite book covers. Will your top picks make it to the end? Not without your vote! Take a look at the bracket below to see the Round One match-ups, then cast your vote in the polls below.
Click for a printable (and zoomable) PDF. Fill out your own bracket and see if your predictions were correct!
Round One voting is now closed. Head over to Round Two to see the new match-ups and cast your votes!
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
