A book's cover plays an integral role not only in its success — as any bookseller will tell you, you need something with shelf appeal, something intriguing, something that calls to even the most casual of browsers — but in its identity. The best covers offer hints at the plot and set the mood. They're the prologues, the stage directions. And as a true embodiment of the relationship between the inner and outer story, the cover for Amber Tamblyn's new novel is here — and it offers a myriad of clues about the book itself.
In an exclusive interview with BuzzFeed published earlier today, Tamblyn, who rose to fame with early aughts roles in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie adaptations and the television series Joan of Arcadia, revealed the cover and several major plot points for her debut novel, Any Man. And just a quick warning: this involves discussions of sexual assault.
Any Man by Amber Tamblyn, $16, Amazon
Since taking a step back from the acting game over the past decade, Tamblyn has pursued other creative endeavors — most notably, writing. After exploring and experimenting with both prose and poetry (she published a collection of poetry, Dark Sparkler, with HarperCollins in 2015), Tamblyn began working on what became Any Man nearly three years ago, she said in a recent tweet. The result is a suspenseful, jarring work that straddles literary genres and offers a fresh, if not deeply disturbing, perspective on our society's treatment of sexual assault and rape victims.
Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn, $10, Amazon
Any Man, set to hit shelves this June thanks to publisher HarperCollins, shoulders the enormous responsibility of exploring rape culture from the perspective of male victims. At the core of Any Man is a violent, serial rapist who goes by the name "Maude" — a woman, whose growing collection of male victims she finds in bars, online, on street corners, spans years. The book itself is told from the perspective of these victims, who begin to band and grow together as a result of their shared trauma. And that trauma extends far past their actual assaults; Tamblyn dives deep into the treatment of male rape victims by friends and family, by the police, by the media. We've all heard that chilling phrase: but men can't be raped — right?
"By flipping the gender norms of rape culture, I hope to elicit some fresh, challenging conversations and examinations of who we are as a society while also allowing readers to relish in what I hope will be one of the most vile, heartless, and haunting female protagonists in modern American fiction," Tamblyn told BuzzFeed.
Any Man by Amber Tamblyn, $16, Amazon
The cover of Any Man, a swirling cloud of magenta and black smoke, elicits a deeply unsettling fear. You can't quite make heads or tails of it. Is that a person's profile? Are those a pair of lips? The creepy vagueness, the looming threat, speaks to both the mystery of Maude's identity and the painful uncertainty with which some regard allegations of sexual assault.
