For several years now, bookstores are overflowing with blobs of amorphous shape and warm colors. In Print magazine, RE Hawley explores the book jacket trend of the decade. From Print:
This design trend, well into its third or fourth year in the major publishing houses, has attracted plenty of nicknames and attendant discourse online—culture critic Jeva Lange calls it "blobs of suggestive colors," while writer Alana Pockros calls it the "unicorn frappuccino cover," and New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka once referred to it on Twitter as "the Zombie Formalism of book covers."[…]
Among books bestowed with The Book Cover, too, some common factors jump out. They are usually fiction and nearly always written by women, often women of color. They have literary sensibility but broad enough appeal to contend for the bestseller list; they're the sort of books that generate a good deal of buzz and media coverage, likely candidates for an Oprah Book Club nod or a spot on a major literary prize's shortlist.
(via Kottke)
