The Hypothetical Library

Colum McCann

Introduction

I am very honored and pleased to have my first collaboration with Colum McCann. Colum was both the first writer I approached, and the first to respond with an idea. This collaboration epitomizes the spirit of this project because Colum is someone I have wanted to work with for years and now I get my wish.

There isn’t much I can say about his work that hasn’t been better stated by a legion of reviewers, writers, and readers. His prose is unquestionably beautiful, and poetic, and he has used his considerable skills to explore a wide range of ideas, places, and lives. McCann’s hypothetical proposal “In The Country Below” would be just that kind of book, if it were actually going to be a book

 

It's at this point I would like to make clear that this is not Colum's next book. In The Country Below will never be in stores, or on Amazon, there will be no book tours. It will in fact never be written. This is purely a “what if” experiment. Those of us who are fans of Colum, will just have to wait patiently for that next book.

The cover 

 

In The Country Below—the hypothetical flap copy

“In the 17th Century vast numbers of Irish men, women and children were forcibly transported to the American colonies by the British government. In this spectacular reinvention and examination of history, Colum McCann goes to the heart one of the great untold stories of our times as he follows a group of Irish indentured servants on their voyage to the West Indies, their plight on the Atlantic seas, their subsequent serfdom and their eventual liberation on the wave of a bloody revolution. This is a gripping portrayal of another century, another continent, another loss, told in McCann’s unique trademark prose, simultaneously stripped down and lyrical.”

Biography

Colum is the author of two collections of short stories and five novels; Fishing the Sloe-Black River—Stories, Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, Everything in This Country Must A Novella and Two Stories, Dancer, Zoli, and Let The Great World Spin for which Colum was awarded the 2009 National Book Award.

His fiction has been published in 30 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Paris Review, Bomb and many other places. He also teaches in the Creative Writing program at Hunter College. For a more comprehensive listing of Colum’s work and accomplishments I encourage you to visit his web site www.colummccann.com

 Next week: David Lehman

Welcome to The Hypothetical Library

The idea for this blog is to create an opportunity for a part-time book cover designer (me) to collaborate, with a wide range of amazing, contemporary writers on a project outside of their normal body of work. 

The catch is that these books will never really exist. 

I ask each writer to provide flap copy for a book that they haven’t, won’t, but in theory could, write, and then I design a cover for it.

I am not a writer. I have tried over the years, but it is simply something I can not do well. I am, however, a designer—and it’s my combined love of books and graphic design that brought me to the book cover as an outlet for any literary ambitions I may have had.  I have been designing book covers on and off for the past 8 years as a kind of pressure valve to my career in print advertising. Looking back I’ve seen how the two disciplines have influenced one another. In both, a single image combined with some brief text can convey an expansive narrative. 

One of the frustrations of book cover design is that you are usually assigned projects and authors by a publisher. The competition is fierce, and assignments are not always exciting or ideal. Work is offered and you take it. The Hypothetical Library is my workaround. With this project I hope to collaborate with as many wonderful writers as I can get—freed from the constraints of various publishing houses, editors, and budgets.

I want to thank all of the writers who have, and will contribute to this strange project, but special mention must go to Richard Nash, and Shanna Compton. My direct involvement into the world of writers and book covers began many years ago, because of them, and the small press legend, softskull. Without Shanna, and Richard, I would have never met so many amazing writers. 

The goal and mission of this blog is that it should be fun for all involved, the author, myself, and you the viewer. So let’s have some fun.

Hypothetically yours,

Charlie Orr