Career Covers

My Career As A North Korean Novelist

Kim Ju-sŏng | Guardian | 12th December 2023

Extracts from the memoir of an aspiring North Korean writer, who spent years trying to rise through the ranks of an extremely complex literary bureaucracy before escaping south. Success meant freedom and better housing; failure could result in punishment. The most highly regarded genre is “No 1 literature”, which is about the Kim dynasty, while anything “foreign” is frowned upon (4,000 words)

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The common way to talk about happiness is as a single scale: unhappy at one end, neutral in the middle, happy at the other end. This model is wrong.

The Best Book Covers You’ll Never See

Zachary Petit | Fast Company | 11th December 2023

The book covers that you see in bookshops are just “the tip of the iceberg”. Beneath them, unseen, lies a mass of designs that rarely see the light of day — different ways of selling a book that were ultimately discarded on the journey to the final product. Here, a series of designers show an early draft cover for a book alongside the published final, and explain what changed and why (1,700 words)