Who could resist a book with the title The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil? Not me.

Rachel Cooke reviews Stephen Collins’s first book.

capnflynn:

So I am totally late to the #coverflip party, but I really really wanted to do one.  Basically the idea is, what would a book’s cover look like if its author were the opposite gender?  I flipped the fabulous Sarah Rees Brennan’s The Demon’s Lexicon, because it is one of my all-time favs.  Original on the right; please forgive the cheesiness of my stock-image-assembled cover!

Stock credits: London skyline: http://fav.me/d339fq8

Sword: http://fav.me/d52tzv4

Smoke: :thumb102485032:

Pentagram: http://fav.me/dp486q

Some great creations coming out of the coverflip project.

I have heard you are nicknamed after your grandmother. Why?

Igbo people believe in reincarnation. When a baby boy is born after his grandfather’s death, they’ll say: “The old man came back.” It is a benign thing. My father’s mother was a fantastic woman – a feminist. She lost her husband young. His family wanted to take her land, but she went to the all-male meetings of her husband’s people. She barged in, made accusations and she got the community on her side.

You write brilliantly about love. What do you think makes a love last?

I wish I knew… if I did, I would market it. Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘My new novel is about love, race… and hair’ Photograph: Richard Saker

Elizabeth is Austen’s most beloved heroine and most modern girl, unfazed by wealth and status (she makes mincemeat of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in their stand-off), and frank and fearless in her opinions. Her ability to laugh at herself (and others) is one of her best traits. Her intelligence and wit make her a worthy mate for Mr Darcy. She is given some of the best one-liners in all of Austen, including this outrageous comment: “I expected at least that the pigs were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and Her daughter.”

On the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice, the Observer celebrates the genius of one of Britain’s best-loved authors

Photograph: Alex Bailey

The Long Winter (1940)
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s novel – the sixth of the Little House series – is set in South Dakota in 1880, when Laura and her family are stranded for seven months in blizzards. When Christmas day comes round – with no trains getting through – the children have to make do with threadbare presents and watery soup. But the family make up for it when the snow thaws and they re-stage Christmas in May. This time there’s freshly made bread, cranberries, mashed potatoes and a huge turkey. Plates are piled up once, then again. “Lord, we thank Thee for all Thy bounty,” says Pa, before starting to play the fiddle

‘Cover design by Germano Facetti. The Italian designer Facetti was the head of Penguin design from 1962 to 1971 and initiated the classic – and timeless – style of the 1960s’

From our gallery of classic penguin book covers.

Photograph: Pelican books

Flying Dutchman by Anthony Fokker, 1938.

Penguin book covers: the best of the famous publishing house’s jacket designs – from the classic colour bands to illustrations by Banksy and Shepard Fairey

Photograph: Penguin

We know we’re putting ourselves up for ridicule here, but in celebration of a new book detailing the crime de la creme of typographical errors, from hotel brochures advertising a “French widow in every bedroom” to Tea Party signs declaring President Obama’s “crisis of competnce”, here are some of the finest!

(Source: )

Defiantly untrendy, eternally single, a ‘useless loner who eats ready meals in the dark’. This is the David Mitchell we’ve come to know. But now he’s a very different man: engaged, in love and ready to shout about it

Photograph: David Yeo for the Guardian