Bear Re-imagined

Marian Engel’s Bear was an award-winning Canadian novel relegated to the darkest recesses of literary history. But the Internet never forgets, and so to celebrate its return, we asked five illustrators to re-imagine the novel’s startling cover.

July 31, 2014

Anshuman Iddamsetty was Hazlitt’s art director and audio/visual producer. Before that they were an associate producer and sound designer for such CBC ...

"Bear is a strange and wonderful book, plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale, and with the same disturbing resonance." Those were the words of Margaret Atwood, in praise of Marian Engel's Bear, perhaps the most celebrated work of fiction about, in part, a woman's unquenchable lust for a bear. 

We're fond of Engel here at Hazlitt; it is the rare author who can turn the erotic coupling between Homo sapien and Ursus arctos into a best-selling winner of the Governor General's Award for Literary Fiction. 

Also, its contents are a playground for bored book designers everywhere. Like this paperback—just look at it.

Anshuman Iddamsetty was Hazlitt’s art director and audio/visual producer. Before that they were an associate producer and sound designer for such CBC Radio One programs as GOKnow Your Rights, and the award-winning Spark