Very brave to print the same George Lois 1968 cover in the latest Spanish Esquire. But then, the Spanish (and Russian) version of the magazine are always brave and brilliant with their cover execution.

A sentence in a Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, illustrated to me the difference between American writers and English writers. Hornby writes of a note (a quote from The Hustler by Walter Tevis) he stuck to his wall to inspire him when he was a struggling writer:

At one point (oh God oh God oh God) I typed these words out on a piece of paper and pinned it above my desk:

“That’s what the whole goddamned thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it – most people don’t even do that. You’re smart and you’re young and you’ve got, like I said before, talent.”

The ‘oh God oh God oh God’, is Hornby’s way of distancing himself from what he did. How foolish he was! How naive! But of course Dear Reader, he knows better now. As do you. How clever. How British. British writers are far too ‘aware’ – aware of how their writing will come across to the Guardian critic, to the reader or to their Dear Old Mum. This perpetual state of punch pulling is grating and ultimately, results in watered down memoirs and saccharine fiction. A prime example of this is the bizarrely popular Geoff Dyer, whose book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, becomes almost unreadable it’s so ‘knowing’.

If the English do something stupid, it’s in an ironic way – like traveling around Ireland with a fridge, or saying yes to everything. There are very few stark, honest works by modern British writers that skip the irony and the navel gazing and just tell us what the hell happened. Martin Amis aside, this leaves us with the Americans. They do stupid things too, usually involving women, drink, drugs, or all three. Yet they don’t apologise to the reader for their actions. And this leads to stunning work.

John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Frederick Exley and more recently, Patrick DeWitt, have balls. Great big hairy balls that allow them to expose their own failings in razor sharp prose, not caring how stupid or lethal their actions make them seem. Virtually all my fiction purchases these days are from American writers (and the odd Russian) for that reason alone.

Seneca – Letters to a Stoic
Victoria Schofield – Every Rock, Every Hill
Nicholas Barringon – A Passage to Nuristan
Fariba Nawa – Opium Nation
David Sedaris – Naked
Chuck Pahlucknick – Choke
Bret Easton Ellis – Glamorama
John Clellon Holmes – Go
Albert Camus – The Stranger
Mark Van Vugt – Selected
Herman Hesse – Siddhartha
Jasper Morrison – Muji
Ralph Waldo Emerson – Collected Essays

We are getting some web love regarding the February cover of Open Skies, which is all the more gratifying given it’s the first cover we have done in-house. The process was as follows: I started off wanting to use a particular type of yellow as we had not used it before on the cover (and the last time we used yellow at all was in issue one back in March last year). This is the first time I have started the cover process with a colour, but I was determined to make this shade of yellow work.

There are two types of covers you can have with a themed issue (as all our issues are). A cover that relates to the general theme of the issue (see here) or one that focuses on a specific article within the issue (see here). Most of our covers focus on the general theme – as we are not on the news stand, we don’t have to rely on multiple cover lines to grab attention, and if you focus on one feature on the cover, you will need a cover line.

For this issue, I wanted to do something different – to focus on some of the features inside the issue without being too explicit about those features. So, inspired by the buttons on the Sony Playstation handset, I asked Roui (our ace designer) to come up with some logos. The DeLorean car was easy, the Super Mario Bros. icon was also self evident. For the Silicon Valley piece, we went with a retro Apple Mac, and the final logo is from the design of the Tim Ferriss piece, which happened pretty late in the day.

Roui then added a filter to the icons to give them a slightly retro look (nothing worse than a tech cover full of shine and ‘newness’) and placed them on the page. I like to keep things minimal whenever possible, and so shrunk the icons and added a no-fuss/no serif font. It is tempting to be too clever on the cover page when it comes to the cover line, so we kept it simple: The Technology Issue. We had few other options we sent to Emirates, but they also preferred this version.

And there it is, one of the best parts of the job, choosing a cover. Next month (Our London issue) will see us doing something completely different again. Stay tuned.

The Wndr Kabul mobile app is nearly ready – it’s the first mobile application guide to Kabul. It’s free, so download it at: www.wndrkabul.com or if you are an Android user, download here. There is still lots of content to be uploaded, which will be a continuous process over the coming months. We have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, so let us know what you think.

In my quest for new content, found this remarkable video. Showcases some of the stunning scenery the country has to offer. Planning a trip back there later this year, possibly to Mazar-e-Sharif and Herat.

One of the best covers we have done for Open Skies, courtesy of Filip Peraic. The story, by Observer film critic, Philip French, is a good one too. We made cover of the day on the Newmanology site.

Coverjunkie has released a magazine featuring some of the best magazine covers of 2011. My
favourite was this brilliant New York Times Magazine cover – simple but beautiful. Last year
saw a lot of excellent covers and a rise in the overall standard of magazines and their design. I
think this probably had to do with the iPad and the belief that if print is to continue, it needs to
play to its strengths. This bodes well for 2012. Wndr will be bringing out some print products of
our own in the next three months, so stay tuned.

Katherine Graham – Personal History
Charlie Koolhas & Ahmad Makia – Evolving Spaces
Robert Penn Warren – All the King’s Men
Malcolm Lowry – Under The Volcano
Brett Easton Ellis – Imperial Bedrooms
Granta 112 – Pakistan
Thomas D Zengotita – Mediated
Heidi Holland – Dinner With Mugabe