Wednesday May 12, 2010

“The Cryerer” Gets a Cover for One Story

Pictured here is a dust jacket for my story “The Cryerer”—which originally appeared as One Story #8 in 2002—created by graphic designer Patrick Borelli. It will be auctioned off next week at One Story’s Literary Debutante Ball, a fundraiser for the magazine that I’m excited to support.

One Story, founded by Maribeth Batcha and Hannah Tinti, started out with a great idea: sending one slim story out (via good old snail mail) to subscribers every three weeks. Eight years later, they’re up to issue #135 and the list of authors who have appeared in One Story’s pages is a virtual who’s who. For next week’s fundraiser, more than 30 artists have contributed work inspired by issues of One Story. I asked Patrick to design a dust jacket because, well, I thought it would be funny to put a dust jacket on something so slight, but also because I knew Patrick (who is an accomplished comedian as well) had been thinking very hard about book covers. I think he killed this one, and I hope it raises a little money for One Story.

Even if you can’t make it to the event for the silent auction, you can submit an absentee bid on this and the other works up for auction on May 21. With Patrick’s dust jacket, however, it does actually come wrapped around the issue it was inspired by. The best way to acquire the story is, of course, via this auction, but if you’d like to sample it first, it is available in my 2006 e-book release Single.