I was reading ‘White Readers Meet Black Authors’ today, and when I clicked on the post about J. California Cooper’s new novel ‘Life Is Short But Wide’, I thought I was seeing Jeffrey Ford’s ‘The Girl in the Glass.’

Look familiar?
Stuff like this cracks me up. I freelance as a photo editor, and last month my co-op’s monthly flier showed up in my mailbox covered in the same images I had been staring at all morning for my current project. I see stock images everywhere. Its like my brain has developed stock-dar.
I’m guessing that even if the book designers above were aware of the duplication, they were thinking “Literary Fantasy? African-American? Never the genre shall meet.” But I’ve foiled them. I’m going to read both.
(For a few more covers, see YA author Scott Westerfeld’s ‘Lookalikes‘ post about his own books).
February 16, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I’ve similar covers but never like this. I like the title text and location better on Cooper’s cover but I like the location of whatever that thing in the center of Ford’s cover better.