New Work: ‘Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives’

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is writer-neuroscientist David Eagleman’s collected imaginings about what might happen in the Great Beyond. With a sellout first edition published in hardcover in February 2009, Sum is on its way to becoming a cult classic, praised by Philip Pullman and Brian Eno. (In a blurb on the book’s cover, Eno says “every story is a new Heaven,” and earlier this summer he scored a performance based on the book.) Angus Hyland’s cover for the new paperback edition from Canongate features a die-cut doorway and exit sign that make the book stand out on the shelves and reminds us of our own inevitable egress.