Anders Nilsen Interprets John Wyndham!
In lieu of our regular weekly USEREVIEW posts, we at CAROUSEL will be using each Wednesday in December to highlight just a few of the many exciting artistic projects that former contributors have been at work on outside of the pages of our magazine. Up now: Anders Nilsen’s covers for new reissues of classic John Wyndham books!
Past CAROUSEL contributor Anders Nilsen is the Los Angeles-based artist & author of ten books including Big Questions, The End and Poetry is Useless. We’ve featured his work multiple times over the years in various capacities: in CAROUSEL 17 (2005), we featured Nilsen’s annotated black-and-white drawing Self-Knowledge. For CAROUSEL 37 (2016), cartoonist Marc Ngui interviewed Nilsen about his own work, as well as his artistic and literary influences.
In the years since we last featured Nilsen, he’s been hard at work on a variety of projects: publishing issues 1–5 of Tongues, a graphic retelling of the myth of Prometheus, and In Your Next Life You Will Be Together With All of Your Friends, a full-colour collection of short comics. He’s also had illustrations appear regularly in venues including the New York Review of Books, and commentary appear in the New York Times and elsewhere.
One of Nilsen’s recent projects that we were particularly excited to hear about is a series of book covers he’s been commissioned by Modern Library to design. Through several blog posts on The Monologuist, Nilsen recounts in depth his process of crafting covers for new reissues of books by John Wyndham, the 20th-century English science fiction writer best known for books like the post-apocalyptic The Day of the Triffids (1951), which was later made into a film. Triffids, in fact, was the first book of Wyndham’s for which Nilsen designed a cover, and was subsequently followed by eight further covers for reissues of books by Wyndham.
These lovely books (all released in 2022) are available now through Penguin Random House, and a stunning 17″ x 27″ poster featuring all nine covers by Anders Nilsen is also available for purchase directly from the artist!
