Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers, which will be published by Hub City Press on August 26 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard.
Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it.
As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.
Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world.
Here is the cover, designed by Meg Reid, with art by Daniel Ablitt.
Author Austyn Wohlers: “Hothouse Bloom is a novel in part about the emotional and material necessity of other people that masquerades as a slow, painterly, and solitary nature novel for its first half. As we were looking for cover art, I was emphatic that I didn’t want it to just look like a run-of-the-mill American nature novel, and that I wanted it to feel a little psychedelic, since so much of the language of the book is watercolory, dizzying, and elemental. I’m happy to have found Daniel’s painting, which unites a lot of those elements. The blurriness of landscape and setting—in the background forested mountains, a tree, or a colored ray of light. The focus on flora, which takes up all of Anna’s vision. The two red silhouettes, which could stand for a number of people in the novel but most likely Jan and Anna, which are both stark and a little vague, a little mysterious, and red like the apples Anna cultivates.
It took us a long time to decide how we wanted to do the typography. I have always liked how older books, poetry books, and certain presses like NYRB look where there is more focus on the design and less on big text, and I like the starkness and austerity of the typography we went with. At the same time, I wanted it, again, to look a little ‘psychedelic’ or ‘off,’ to key readers in to some of the wonkiness of the book, and was playing with some very minor visual distortions of the title text. We ended up going with a barely perceptible gold inkstain around the white text that you might not even notice at first glance, as though Anna’s painting were spilling or some celestial substance oozing out of the title.”
Designer Meg Reid: “It was a joy to work with Austyn on this cover. I love when authors know exactly how they want their book to present itself in the world and it’s my job to simply put ideas in front of them and refine. I loved how the image reflected the overwhelming intensity of the natural world that Anna yearns to belong to with branches reaching in and intertwining with the figures and I was especially struck by the vivid red of the two silhouettes—an intense hue that evokes Anna’s paints, apples, and blood—against the bruised colors of the mountain and sky.”
Artist Daniel Ablitt: “‘Time and place (red silhouette)’ is drawn from a memory I have from a family holiday in the U.S. We visited Yosemite National Park for a few days camping. This painting is of myself with my younger brother. My aim was to capture that feeling you get with a memory; of the details being blurred but the strong emotional connection to that moment remains clear.”
