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Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover for the novel If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, which will be published by Verso Books on September 3, 2024. Preorder the book here.
“A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.”
So opens Vigids Hjorth’s ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux’s A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.
Here is the cover, designed by tk, art by TK.
Author Vigdis Hjorth: “I like it immediately. I like it intensely. I like that it’s so red. I like that it is not naturalistic, that it is artificial. I like that the woman’s face is realistic in its expression, the horror at the sight of what may be her own future self.”
Designer tk: “tk”