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Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Nanny Nanny by K Chiucarello, which will be published November 17, 2026 by Ecco. You can pre-order your copy here!
After years of caring full-time for the children of the rich and the famous, our narrator has been struck, finally, with baby fever. Over a drink with sympathetic friends, she lists all the reasons why she wants to have a baby, beginning with a story about the intoxicating, abusive relationship with an ex-wife that she barely survived. She ponders how to fill the gaping void left in the wake of such horrific domestic violence. What’s the next most violent thing a woman can do to herself? she asks. Have a baby.
Soon, her story opens other doors to the past—the seemingly idyllic childhood she spent under her father’s roof; the mentorship, and judgment, of female writers whose children she has reared; and the man, her first love, who now seems to be offering her a second chance. Each unraveling thread reveals the complex tangle of thrill and pain, tradition and progress that has led her to this moment, this calling. Is it time for her to become a mother?
K Chiucarello’s stunningly original debut novel explores the brutality of gendered violence, including the gossip that polices women’s choices and the conventions that determine which women have the right to tell their story, and how. With wit, candor, and unprecedented nuance, Nanny Nanny upends every expectation of a book about motherhood, queering the biological clock and subverting narrative bounds.
Here is the cover, designed by Vivian Lopez Rowe with art by Julie Blackmon:
K Chiucarello: Even before I sold Nanny Nanny to Ecco, my editor, Deborah Ghim, and I talked about cover ideas. We are both very visual people and we wanted our mutual tastes to guide the editing process. I remember referencing Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Joy Williams’ Harrow—sparse covers where something was askew but the title read as grounded, assertive, nearly screaming. After we officially moved into editing, I created a mood board of original art work for more inspiration.
There was a lot of Robin F. Williams, Caroline Walker, Louise Giovanelli, Vanessa Baird, Rosalind Nashashibi, Genieve Figgis pinned—visual artists that focus a lot on gender performance and/or domestic labor. Something that Deborah and I spoke about often was that we didn’t want the cover to tip over into horror in any type of way, which became a difficult line to tread when pulling images.
When Julie Blackmon’s “Patio” landed it felt like the singular solution. In the expert hands of Vivian Lopez Rowe, our brilliant cover designer, Blackmon’s photograph perfectly encapsulates the world of NANNY NANNY. It was the lone photograph of the cover options but there was something nearly Kubrick-esque drawing me into the final product: the symmetry of the title, the geometry of the home, the flat perspective. There’s a lot of mirroring that happens in the novel—hetero versus queer relationships, city versus rural landscapes, the narrator’s ex-wife versus the children that the narrator nannies, etc. The little girl looking at an image of herself in the great hopes of finding an adult or something comforting inside, seeking out but being trapped in your own image or making, it spoke to the most major themes of the novel. The adult in the photograph that is reading a magazine entitled NEW YOU, the spiraled hose, the off-centered fire ablaze were little cherries on top.
Vivian Lopez Row: The publishing team and I agreed that we wanted the cover to depict motherhood, but not in a way that glamorized it or was idealistic about it. Early on I looked at paintings—to match the story, the women in them looked overwhelmed and exhausted. I then looked at photography and found the perfect cover image by Julie Blackmon. Her work blends the mundane and surreal moments of domesticity. This particular image, “Patio,” has a nostalgia that can relate to the main character’s childhood or her time as a nanny. It also shows a very real moment of exhausted distraction; even as a fire on the grill is blazing unattended, it’s like she has gotten used to the chaos in her life. For type, I went bold. I really wanted a contrast to the quieter elements of the cover image and to work with the fire to heighten the drama.
