The Firebird Raven

Here is the final cover for the upcoming paperback edition of the Raven: the final piece as conceived by Renato Alarcao.

You can check back through the proposals on earlier posts and see if you think it was the best choice. If not, which is your favorite?

Like most of the sketches, it's romantic and active. The gyre of the bird rising up from the lake sets the air and light into whirling motion, and it catches up Adanta's hair, shawl, and skirts.

The rich color and mysterious handling of light makes it a good pairing with Renato's image for the FSG jacket of Ingledove. This one has the drama of brightness tossing the dark into the air, but the malachite of this water will go well with the cobalt lake that Ingledove and Lang are crossing on the other jacket. Somewhere, up on a 17th floor in Rio, Renato is dreaming up his pictures right now--or maybe tossing his baby. His next U. S. project is a book for Candlewick, and I'm looking forward to that one.

And now my youngest is telling me that I need to write a book "for him." Maybe I'll make a deal; if he won't bring home any more pernicious winter bugs from his little Yankee elementary school, I just might do it.

from the Pest House: reading Epstein

One of the few pleasures of having my third miserable Yankee bug of the fall is ignoring some of the work that needs to be done for a family of five and doing a little extra reading. Yesterday I reread some Singer stories ("Gimpel the Fool," "The Mirror," "The Wedding," and more) and a story from Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales. Rereading is delicious...

One of my very favorite essays is Joseph Epstein's "What Yiddish Says: The God-haunted fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer." Epstein is unfailingly amusing and interesting, with breadth and depth and thoughtfulness and even a certain desirable humility when he confronts the mysteries of life. All this I admire. So one of the things I have read with pleasure during the current plague is his essay about Edmund Wilson in Commentary.

Epstein finds Wilson falling short in grasping "the mysteries," and says that such lapses lead to shortsightedness: "I suspect his difficulty with Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, two major writers whose power he could never quite comprehend, stemmed from the fact that each took as his subject, precisely, the complex mystery of life: Conrad on the cosmic level, asking why we are put on earth; Kafka on the level of human nature, asking why we are as sadly and comically limited as we are." I especially like the preface to his glancing-but-damning blow, saying that Wilson "traveled light": "One of the advantages artists have over critics is that they can be nearly complete damn fools and still produce interesting and important, even lasting, art. Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial. Wisdom, in a critic, is never excess baggage."

Today's picture is another Renato Alarcao sketch, one of the proposals for the new cover of The Curse of the Raven Mocker. I'll put the choice for cover up next.

Curiouser & curiouser

To the right: another sketch by Renato Alarcao for The Curse of the Raven Mocker. This one shows Adanta with a wren, her grandmother's house in the background.

And here's an interesting "picture": I skipped over to Arts Journal and note the contrast of the two "publishing" stories currently posted. One is a story about National Novel-Writing Month, reporting that 10,000 of the 60,000 people enrolled in NaNoWriMo managed to finish a manuscript of 50,000 words. The other article is about sales of English-language literary fiction, and it's called "The great fiction crash of 2005."

Now isn't that a curious pair?

Illustration techniques of Renato Alarcao

Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear.
--from Marina Warner, Wonder Tales

Here's another Renato Alarcao sketch for The Curse of the Raven Mocker: the raven; the grandmother's mountain-top house above the twisting paths; Adanta behind Tass on his pony, Polk.

Here's something Renato wrote me about how he works: ". . . it is usually a blend of traditional and digital. Well, I have many different styles and use a myriad of techniques, depending on what the manuscript suggests (or what the editor wants). The pieces with textured surfaces and scratchy lines ("Ingledove", "The Curse of the Ravenmocker" and "Red Ridin' in the Hood") were done with black etching paint over transparent acetate. Then I scan it into the computer and apply the colors. The final touch is the pencil outline which is applied digitally as well. It takes forever to finish one single piece!!"