From The Paris Review:

Joanna Neborsky is a book lover’s illustrator. She may be as passionate and romantic about books and bookmaking as anyone I’ve met. She also draws the kind of pictures I’ve always wanted to make. They are deceptively simple due to the naive charm of each wobbly line, and they owe a great deal to the inspiration of mid-twentieth-century illustration—an obsession she and I both share. A few years ago Joanna and I collaborated on the cover of John Bowe’s Americans Talk About Love. A recent art school grad, she was willing to endlessly modify caricatures of the people interviewed for the book. The final package made for a witty and accessible take on social history. I always urge the artists I work with to keep me apprised of new projects, and so a few weeks ago I was tickled to discover a jpeg of Joanna’s poster “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects, As Catalogued by M. Lemoel on May 20, 1880, Twelve Days after the Writer’s Death” in my inbox. We had to share it with readers of The Paris Review, and now I wanted to share a little about how it came to be.

How did you first come up with this assignment? Have you always been fascinated by Flaubert or were you reading Madame Bovary and it just hit you?

I’m lucky to have friends who read widely and weirdly, and several pointed me toward Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas as I wrestled with the Great Illustrator’s Block of Early 2012. I went to the Brooklyn Public Library to learn more about the satirical dictionary and picked up Geoffrey Wall’s Flaubert: A Life. In the back of the biography, I found the list of Flaubert’s belongings. Is it absurd to say the book fell from my hands and opened onto the very page? I’m pretty sure this happened. Wall calls the catalogue, which was compiled by a notary public twelve days after Flaubert’s death on May 20, 1880, “a strangely cold mirror of the life that had unfolded in and amongst this elegant constellation of things.” The list is barren, orderly, lyrical. It spoke of a life in the way “That vase” speaks of a life now gone in Philip Larkin’s “Home Is So Sad.” On a more tactile level, I saw that I would get to draw javelins, animal skins, and thirty-five champagne glasses... (continue reading)

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