Na Kim Designs the Book Covers You Judge

At her studio in Brooklyn on a recent morning, Na Kim sighed. She wasn’t sure about her latest painting, a portrait of a woman with brooding eyes and a sweep of dark hair.

“Because I don’t have a goal of what it should look like,” she said, “I spend time afterward thinking, ‘What do I like about it, what do I not like about it?’”

The walls and shelves were lined with dozens of variations of the portrait. Ms. Kim, a petite 38-year-old woman with a chin-length bob, had started the series about two years ago when, acting on a long-held desire to paint, she decided to finish a painting each day. Without quite meaning to, she created a vast body of work. Some of it is on view this month in “Memory Palace,” a solo exhibition at Nicola Vassell Gallery in Manhattan.

Still, she had misgivings about her latest canvas. “If it’s not sitting right with me, then it’s fine to ruin,” she said, “because it’s probably not good anyway.”

When Ms. Kim isn’t painting, she is hard at work in her vocation as the creative director at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Readers who do not know her name are likely to be familiar with the crisp, moody covers she has designed for scores of books including Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour” and Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart.”

Since 2021, Ms. Kim has also been the art director of The Paris Review. In that job she has helped overhaul the look of the 72-year-old literary magazine, selecting provocative artworks for its print edition, like an oil painting of a woman who is naked save for a pair of sheer black tights.

“Everything is beautiful with Na,” said Dierdre Shea, an industrial designer who has known Ms. Kim since they were students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “And it’s not like this intense effort for her. I mean, she works super hard. But, you know, I think how creative she is — it’s just very innate in her.”

Other friends described her as private and elusive. For Ms. Kim, who was born in Seoul and grew up in South Korea and New Jersey, the diminishment of the self is just part of the job.

“It’s really about serving the book in the best way you can,” she said. “And a lot of the time it means leaving yourself out of it.”

‘It’s Na’s Cover’

When she designs a book, she tries to see it both as the writer does and as a reader might. She said she typically reads it several times and tries to follow her intuition about scenes and metaphors that evoke its core.

When Ms. Kim set out to design the cover of “Fresh Complaint,” a 2017 story collection by Jeffrey Eugenides, a writer she had long admired, her desire to impress him got in the way at first, she said. The first image she proposed, a red stiletto with a nail in place of a heel, wasn’t what Mr. Eugenides had in mind.

“I thought the mood it expressed was harder and more adversarial than the mood of the stories,” he said in an email interview.

Ms. Kim wrote an essay on her experience with Mr. Eugenides titled “When Your Favorite Writer Does Not Like Your Initial Cover Designs.” In it, she described how she went back to the drawing board after her early efforts didn’t make the cut, forcing herself to put aside her urge to dazzle. She eventually came up with something that did the trick.

“Her idea to print an illustration on the book itself and to use a transparent jacket cover to complete and accentuate it was clever and eye-catching,” Mr. Eugenides wrote of the final version. “I liked it immediately.”

In recent years, bright swaths of color and chunky fonts have become recurrent features of contemporary book covers, a trend the writer Margot Boyer-Dry in 2019 called the “Bold and Blocky Instagram Era of Book Covers.” If covers of late all seem to “look the same,” that’s because so many readers buy books online, where covers need to fit legibly into a thumbnail image.

At Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Ms. Kim said, she has been able to try subtler designs because of the publisher’s more literary, less commercial books and her bosses’ trust in her. They’re “really open to new ideas and things that haven’t been imagined before,” she said.

She has designed covers that are painterly and line drawn, spare and surrealist. They may all be different from one another, but many writers recognize Ms. Kim’s sensibility when they see it.

“She has this strong instinct for beauty and balance, and the striking image,” Ms. Heti said in an interview. “I often have these feelings about books — I love that cover — and then I turn it over and it’s Na’s cover.”

For “Pure Colour,” Ms. Kim and Ms. Heti explored a few different minimalist, black- and-white illustrations that the author felt might suit a book about a young woman whose spirit goes into a leaf.

Then Ms. Heti brought Ms. Kim a different idea: Could she do something with an Ellsworth Kelly lithograph? Ms. Heti had seen the work — a vivid green amoebic form — in the Lower Manhattan apartment of a friend, the writer and artist Leanne Shapton.

Ms. Kim got to work, sending draft after draft, some with visible brushwork or set off with contrasting shades. So intense was their collaboration, Ms. Heti said, that Ms. Kim appeared to her in a dream. They decided on Kelly’s original green shape, with a mix of black and gold text in a custom font by Ms. Kim.

“I didn’t even know that it was possible to feel that way about a cover,” Ms. Heti said.

‘What Am I Going to Paint?’

Ms. Kim and her older brother had a peripatetic childhood — it was “complicated,” she said — moving between South Korea and various towns in New Jersey. She grew up drawing and running track. She thought about becoming a physician like her father, an orthopedic surgeon, but also admired her aunt, a painter.

When it came time to sort through college acceptances, she chose the Maryland Institute College of Art, but was still afraid to admit that she wanted to paint professionally, she said. Instead, she studied illustration, which she hoped would be more practical.

After graduation, she bartended and waited tables in Baltimore, as she had done while in school. After a freelance assignment for Farrar, Straus and Giroux showed her a potential career path, she landed an internship at Bloomsbury Publishing in New York.

When Bloomsbury’s full-time designer left, Ms. Kim was hired in her place. She went on to hold similar posts at other publishing houses before joining Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015. For each year of her tenure there, her work has appeared on The New York Times’s annual list of best book covers.

Her career took another turn in 2021 when Emily Stokes, who was then the editor of The Paris Review, hired Ms. Kim to reinvigorate the 72-year-old literary magazine. Working with the designer Matt Willey, they scrapped the magazine’s cover lines and gave the space entirely to works by artists including Stanley Whitney, Danielle Orchard and Rose Wylie.

Ms. Kim has made The Paris Review once again “feel like a publication that people who care about visual art will want to read and admire,” Ms. Stokes said.

Last September, Ms. Stokes and Ms. Kim invited the painter Ann Craven to the roof of the magazine’s office to paint the moonrise en plein-air. Ms. Kim looked on as she painted. “This is somebody doing the thing they are supposed to be doing,” Ms. Kim recalled thinking.

Ms. Kim said she decided to take up painting herself because she had grown “tired of watching other people be brave,” including an ex-boyfriend whom she had encouraged to paint. Still, she wasn’t sure what her subject would be.

“Because I spent some time doing work for other people, I was challenged to think of, well, I want to paint, but what am I going to paint?” she said.

She was drawn to portraiture because “something felt really natural and right about painting a face.” But the portraits she began painting, almost all of which feature a female subject whose gaze drifts just beyond the viewer, don’t depict a real person. “I’m still following that without thinking about what it means so much,” she said.

Occasionally, she would post a finished work on Instagram. That caught the attention of Matthew Higgs, the chief curator of the nonprofit art space White Columns, which is known for discovering artists. In 2023, he invited Ms. Kim to contribute work to an art fair.

“I’d seen her skill as an illustrator and as a designer — she’s obviously just phenomenally talented in terms of the craft of making things,” Mr. Higgs said. “But I liked that she was sort of wrestling with painting, and then within that — or beyond that — wrestling with, What does one do with painting?”

Big Night

These days, Ms. Kim typically spends a couple hours at her easel in the morning, when the light is best, perhaps while listening to Willie Nelson or Bad Bunny, before turning to her design work. Her 9-year-old rescue dog, Moon, is usually curled up nearby.

When she’s not working, she’s often making small mementos for friends — like the miniature clay horse, complete with a lock of her own hair for a tail, that she once gave Ms. Stokes. She also hosts dinner parties that showcase her skills in the kitchen. She once won a neighborhood pie-baking contest by constructing a stunning pastry stuffed with Korean short rib, a friend remembered. And though she may occasionally be spotted at a magazine party, she prefers more intimate gatherings.

“I’m not an events person,” she said on a recent evening at the Nicola Vassell Gallery, where a bundled-up crowd took in her paintings at the show’s opening reception.

Ms. Kim, with Moon in tow, greeted friends and colleagues.

“The paintings are traditionally accomplished, with brilliant brush work and use of color,” Ms. Stokes said. “But there’s something unnerving about them. There’s an uncanniness to the images.”

As the event wound down, Ms. Kim took an Uber with a group including Ms. Vassell and Mr. Higgs to Lupa, an Italian restaurant in the West Village. In a private dining room, Ms. Vassell raised a glass to Ms. Kim.

“I think everyone here sort of sits in the cross-section of all the interesting paths Na has taken,” Ms. Vassell said. “And it’s a reflection of how interesting she is as a human being.”

For a moment, it looked like Ms. Kim might say a few words. But she demurred.