5 Possible Book Covers—Which Would *YOU* Choose?

Recently, I published a book of conversations, The Artist as Mystic, along with a writer I admire but have never met, Alex Stein. Alex and I became friends when he was editing an anthology of modern aphorists and asked me to submit my work. We kept in touch, thrilled to discover we shared a similar taste in books and, one day, embarked on a our own unusual project. I would speak to him over the phone, for hours on end, about my literary and philosophy masters at the time, and he would record the conversations. Then, as he was transcribing them, Alex would take the liberty to edit, polish and slightly rewrite some of my responses to try and make them sing, give them wings.

Here's how our publisher, eventually, described our strange book of assisted monologues:

The Artist as Mystic is a set of lyric conversations between aphorists Yahia Lababidi and Alex Stein. These conversations constitute what Australians call a ‘Songline’—a set of sacred songs that allow the reader/listener to navigate through an unknown terrain, in this case, populated by tortured and ecstatic souls: Kafka, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kierkegaard and Ekelund.

One thing our publisher also did, which is not common practice, is he let us choose among five book covers. I remember my heart leaped the morning I received the proposed sketches for our cover—indecisive, glutton for Beauty that I am and debauchee of cover artist, Egon Schiele; I loved them all! Below, is the embarras de choix (embarrassment of choices, as they say in French) that I was confronted with :)

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Because, I found it near impossible to choose just one, our publisher was kind and indulgent enough to let us have two: the first image in this post we used for the Kindle edition and the one, below, for the paperback book:

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For those who might be interested, here’s the video trailer for The Artist as Mystic

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