Pictures of Fishermen

My story collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea came out with a cover illustration chosen for it (over my repeated and furious protest) by Harper Prism in 1994: a sweet, gooey, airyfairy-fantasy scene, known to me and my friends as The Bimbo in the Lake.

When Minotauro in Spain translated the book they put a marvelous detail from a painting by Martin Johnson (Lake George, 1862) on their cover, which has been one of my favorites for years. (My good editor at HarperCollins, Jennifer Brehl, used it as a model for the style of the small picture on the jacket of the Harper Perennial editon in 2004). Now the Turkish publisher Metis has turned up with a whole different approach — raw and dark instead of dreamy, but equally well suited to the title story.

Just to drown out the memory of the Bimbo in the Lake, here are the Spanish and the Turkish covers.

Copyright © 2007 by Ursula K. Le Guin