Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Book of Exemplary Women” by Diana Xin

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Book of Exemplary Women by Diana Xin, which will be published on December 1st, 2025 by YesYes Books. You can pre-order your copy here and read “Sweet Scoundrel,” first published in Recommended Reading!

In Book of Exemplary Women, Diana Xin’s debut short story collection, a ghost is passed across three generations of women as they reach for understanding and try to hold onto each other’s stories. These three linked pieces take readers across roughly three decades of time. Interspersed between them are many other characters, in different stages of girlhood and womanhood, haunted by the spectors of lost friends, past lovers, and their own unvoiced but untameable desires.

While ghosts, vampires, and other manifestations of dread stalk these pages, many of the stories are firmly grounded in realism. That said, the themes they tackle then reappear in pieces with a slanted realism, similar stories refracted in a different light. This doubled lens mirrors other doublings throughout as characters consider who they are and who they could be, what they want and what they’ve given up.

Here is the cover, designed by Alban Fischer:

Diana Xin: I was really excited to have Alban Fischer take on this project, having admired his cover art on other books I’ve loved. I felt very grateful to have him on board for Book of Exemplary Women.

To start the conversation, Alban shared three cover design concepts. Each one was inspired by a different quote from the book and each one had wildly different aesthetics. There was one cover that featured the figure of a girl in a more modern style with bright colors and a sans serif font (from the line “she did not look away from the mirror). This design contrasted greatly with the other concept (from the line “wolves had eaten her heart”) that included line illustrations of wolves along with a more classic font. How marvelous to have such options!

Both my publisher and I were most drawn to the third design. We were in agreement there right away. The positioning of the hand beckoned us in, but there was a threat in it, too. The flowers in the background were feminine but strange. The pink in the peonies could be mistaken for veins and blood. The empty space behind the flowers, the looming darkness, suggested the erasure common to narratives about women, and also conveyed a certain ghostliness.

That said, we still went back and forth on the details as we tried to finalize it—Could we add some kind of flower or plant that was thornier? What about a splatter of dirt that went beyond hand? This lead Alban to incorporate the thistle and curling vines, which added another element of the strange and unwieldy.

The black thread looped around the two fingers references a specific scene from one of the three linked stories within the book. The thread actually refers to a lock of hair. In these three stories, mother and daughter cannot escape the family’s inherited ghost and continue to carry with them the grief of the past. Hair is a reminder of heritage, impossible to fully shear off.

I love that this image makes it onto the cover, its importance further emphasized by the textual interplay.

In Chinese culture, there is also the idea of a red thread, generally invisible yet tenaciously tying us to all those we are fated to meet. The hand with the thread looped around the fingers pushes us to interrogate that thread. What do we choose to do with fate? How do we serve others? What of their lives do we continue to carry with us?

I thought that the hand was a particularly salient part of the body to feature, for all the labor that women do and the way we continue grasping for each other and holding on to each other’s stories.

Masking the photorealistic flowers behind the shadowy hand also reflected the way the collection as a whole moves in and out of realism. The exemplary woman is a mythological creature. Characters might strive toward their own idea of her, but this pursuit only reveals more of their flaws, and the impossibility of existing in a world with so many expectations.

I imagine this collection living in a cracked mirror world. Various themes are refracted throughout—grief and desire, cancer and affairs—but some stories take place on the right side of the mirror, while others play with the light seeping in through the cracks, entertaining the otherworldly.

In Ming Dong Gu’s Chinese Theories of Fiction, he posits that one narrative tradition of Chinese fiction is the fantastic captured as the everyday, something akin to magical realism. Although I wasn’t aware of this during the many drafts and revisions, and my writing is also influenced by my education in English literature and creative writing, I was glad to find this thread that connected back to the stories I loved as a child.

The flowers within the shadow of the hand—reality encapsulated within the ghostly—perfectly echoes this lens.

Alban Fischer: The brief for Book of Exemplary Women was pretty open, and it wasn’t difficult to hit upon that one indelible image among Diana’s searing narratives to inspire several options. Struck by “His auntie said that his mother was not here because she had no heart, because wolves had eaten her heart” from “Sweet Scoundrel,” I created one option featuring a drawing of a pack of menacing wolves with a ragged space missing, as if clawed away, revealing title behind. Another drew on a moment from “Intermission” and featured a young woman’s form effaced by a mirrored surface (“She did not look away from the mirror”), with the type in a languid, breezy typeface over top. The third and preferred option took the sensuous “She looped the hair twice around her middle and index fingers” from “Visiting Hours” as its impetus. I wanted something that was at once sensuous and sinister; the publisher and author felt the same and requested the addition of the thistle and vine elements.