Jonathan Gibbs reviews books for The Independent and elsewhere. He recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at UEA and is working on a novel. He blogs on this aspect of his writing at tinycamels.wordpress.com and tweets at @Tiny_Camels
This is the YA book series that is currently going through our house, and the kids’ primary school, and probably, everywhere like, er, a plague: Gone, and its sequels, by Michael Grant.
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 14 June 2013 at 10:54 am
Sometimes book design is not just about marketing – about providing the best interface between the book and the reader – it’s about producing something beautiful, where the design applies to every single element in a book – from words to images to paper to spine.
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 7 June 2013 at 12:11 pm
Let’s talk book blurbs, those quotes you get, usually from other writers, that are meant to entice you in. When do they work, and when do they go wrong – when a quote is underwhelming, or over the top, done to death, or even comes from beyond the grave…
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 17 May 2013 at 12:36 pm
‘What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations,’ is the idle thought of Alice, lying on a bank on a hot summer’s day, before her trip down the rabbit hole, but of course for most grown-up books (or, let us say, novels) it’s the other way round. What use are pictures, in [...]
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 10 May 2013 at 10:00 am
Javier Marías is a major writer, whose name tends to get mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize. So why is it that when I look at his latest book, my first reaction is an annoying earworm of a vocal line jumping around in my head, a woman warbling “It’s got be-ye-ye-yeeee perfect”?
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 3 May 2013 at 12:49 pm
Sam Byers’ debut novel, Idiopathy, is coming out in 11 different territories. I asked him about how the design process has been for him, and what it’s taught him about different markets.
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 26 April 2013 at 10:00 am
I saw this cover on Twitter – the shop-window of the new digital market place – and was immediately drawn to its playful mix of the cuddly and the severe. And what the hell does ‘Instant-Flex 718’ mean, anyway?
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 19 April 2013 at 10:04 am
William Golding might be one of those authors that publishers fear will shrink over time to the contours of a single famous work, that remains read by everyone while their other books languish forgotten.
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 12 April 2013 at 9:54 am
This is new, I thought – not just a new jacket for the paperback of Tim Parks’ last novel, The Server, but a new title. But there was more to this than I realised.
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 5 April 2013 at 10:00 am
Well, we have a date and title for Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch, out this October, and we have the cover. We don’t know who designed it, but still is there anything we can learn from it about the novel it houses?
By Jonathan Gibbs | Arts | Friday, 29 March 2013 at 12:53 pm
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