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Can a picture say a thousand words? When it’s the cover of a book, that’s sometimes the goal. This past year, designers have taken on the challenge of distilling pages of text into a single image with ingenuity. Beautiful, revealing, and unforgettable, these twelve covers (one for each month of the year!) impressed us in 2021.
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The Slaughterman’s Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovits
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Jerusalem Beach by Iddo Gefen
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A Play for the End of the World: A Novel by Jai Chakrabarti
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Starfish by Lisa Fipps
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The Singer and the Scientist by Lisa Rose, Isabel Muñoz (Illustrator)
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The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Philip Boehm (Translator)
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Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler
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The Magician’s Visit by Barbara Diamond Goldin, adapted from a story by I. L. Peretz, Eva Sánchez Gómez(illus.)
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Morningside Heights: A Novel by Joshua Henkin
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Aquarium by Yaara Shehori, Todd Hasak-Lowy (Translator)
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Osnat and Her Dove: The True Story of the World’s First Female Rabbi by Sigal Samuel, Vali Mintzi (illus.)
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What to Miss When by Leigh Stein
Becca Kantor is the editorial director of Jewish Book Council and its annual print literary journal, Paper Brigade. She received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Becca was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to spend a year in Estonia writing and studying the country’s Jewish history. She lives in Brooklyn.