All the world's a stage

Good covers correspond with the meaning of the book;
Great covers add another meaning to it;
But what would a cover artist do for a book that is a masterpiece of double meaning in itself, such as Audition by the brilliant Katie Kitamura? It takes a designer like Lauren Peters-Collaer to create a "Third Meaning." The result is not just a cover - it’s a play in five scenes. Cover Story #2 - Here we go!

Scene 1 - The Lines

The cuts through the words are a visceral nod to Kitamura's obsession with "Lines": The lines of a script; The boundaries we draw to protect ourselves; Even the frequent use of hyphens the author employs to fragment her own prose.

Scene 2 - The parts

Kitamura’s narrative explores "parts" as both theatrical roles and fragments of self. Peters-Collaer physicalizes this theme by shearing the characters. It’s a visual realization of the book's core truth: we aren't whole - we are just stacked roles covering a void.

Scene 3 - The colors

Initially, I didn’t understand these muted, non-intense pastels. After all, we’re dealing with a psychological crisis here - so why did Peters-Collaer choose mint, lavender, and pink? Then I recalled an anecdote the narrator mentions about a pregnancy app that uses "pastel images" of fruit - blueberry, kumquat, pineapple - to sugar-coat the fragility of life. Peters-Collaer uses this same aesthetic trap.

Scene 4 - The characters

In the book, a "Character" is a theatrical role and a "Character" is a person’s intrinsic nature. Peters-Collaer once again layers a third meaning: the literal "Characters" of the alphabet, sheared and broken.

Note that the author’s name is fragmented, too - hinting at the porous boundary between the narrator and the author. The author is, in a sense, one of the characters.

Scene 5 - The void

But the main character in this book is undoubtedly the empty stage (and its cover manifestation - the dark background). If Gestalt is the mind forming meaning from absence, Audition is a Reverse Gestalt: the mind forming an unbearable absence out of the meaning.

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts”

— William Shakespeare