The Americans put a slice of pie on the cover of AL Snijders: good find

Lydia Davis is not only the queen of the American short short fiction (Variations of discomfort and other of her translated collections published by Atlas Contact), she is also a renowned literary translator. Davis translated Flauberts Madame Bovary and Swann’s Way by Proust, but also has favorites in smaller language areas.

Among those favorites is her Dutch counterpart AL Snijders alias Peter Cornelis Müller (1937-2021), a writer she admires for his ‘wit, thoughtfulness and often surprising conclusions’.

Five years ago Davis translated a selection of Snijders’ Very Short Stories (ZKVs), which are entitled Grasses and Trees published as a bilingual edition by AFdH publishers. And now there is night train, a new collection of Snijders translations (partly copied from the first collection), which will be published in collaboration with AFdH by New Directions, the American publisher of greats such as Borges and Nabokov.

Jamie Keenan’s cover design, an inviting slice of pie on a plate, was approved by The New York Times named one of the best of 2021. According to AFdH publisher Paul Abels, it is a finding with a bottom: ‘Snijders has always said that a ZKV is a piece of the cake.’

With its balanced design, Keenan visually matches the ZKVs issued by AFdH since 2006. ‘In the twelve bundles we have created, designer Martien Frijns has always followed one pattern,’ says Abels, ‘in colour, font, type of paper and illustrations, and that has worked.’

The illustrators came from Snijders’ own circle: his sons Gijs and Marcus, his wife Yvonne, his old school friend Rinus van den Bosch and kindred spirits such as Gummbah and Chantal Rens.

The large variation in typefaces is apparent: the author’s name is in Martin Majoor’s Seria Sans, the title in varying variants of another Dutch type family, Fred Smeijers’ Quadraat.