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.
The Slaughterman’s Daughter by Yaniv Iczkovits
Jerusalem Beach by Iddo Gefen
A Play for the End of the World: A Novel by Jai Chakrabarti
Starfish by Lisa Fipps
The Singer and the Scientist by Lisa Rose, Isabel Muñoz (Illustrator)
The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Philip Boehm (Translator)
Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler
The Magician’s Visit by Barbara Diamond Goldin, adapted from a story by I. L. Peretz, Eva Sánchez Gómez(illus.)
Morningside Heights: A Novel by Joshua Henkin
Aquarium by Yaara Shehori, Todd Hasak-Lowy (Translator)
Osnat and Her Dove: The True Story of the World’s First Female Rabbi by Sigal Samuel, Vali Mintzi (illus.)
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 an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Becca spent a year in Estonia on a Fulbright scholarship, writing and studying the country’s Jewish history, and another year in Germany volunteering at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial. She lives in Brooklyn.