Peter Mendelsund is Associate Art Director of Alfred A. Knopf. He has been described by the New York Times as “one of the top designers at work today” and the Wall Street Journal has called his designs “the most instantly recognizable and iconic in contemporary fiction.” He is the author of two books: What We See When We Read and Cover.
Peter Mendelsund
Advertisement
Writing on Public Books
Outtakes for Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”
In Satin Island, the novel’s narrator, an anthropologist, succumbs to a vivid fever dream in which he finds himself flying offshore over an island—an “excrescence, a protuberance”—of waste, runoff, sewage, detritus, crude oil … a beautiful and corrupted “satin island.” So, on the jacket: an archipelago of oil; a ballistic aftermath of ink; a Triste […]
