Does this purse match my metaphors?

by Mary Kay Zuravleff

When it comes to publishing novels, no one mentions the amazing biblioaccessories you attract. My first novel, The Frequency of Souls, had some major memories of DinoPark, whose pamphlet boasted

“Absolutely no imagination was used” to reconstruct these creatures. Among the gifts that book inspired were these earrings a friend found in a thrift store, if you can imagine someone donating them to charity.

The rest of the biblioaccessories featured here were all created by Yael Gen, designer extraordinaire. She took apart my second novel, The Bowl Is Already Broken, to make a candle with the cover and a purse with the gutted hardcover. Once it was in the mail, she said it occurred to her an author might be offended by seeing their book so transformed, but I was thrilled by her close reading. Can’t wait to see what she does with the pages she cut out.

Yael’s already fashioned biblioware for Man Alive!, which won’t be out until September. Because the novel is about a family where the father gets “toasted” by lightning, she presented me with a set of enhanced coasters (above). I for one can’t wait for publication—if nothing else, there’s some barbecue ribs in those chapters that I wouldn’t mind tucking into.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of the forthcoming Man Alive!, as well as The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times praised as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming,” and The Frequency of Souls, which the Chicago Tribune deemed “a beguiling and wildly inventive first novel.” Honors for her work include the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award, and she has been nominated for the Orange Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a cofounder of the D.C. Women Writers Group.