wattle & daub cover design

The world of Wattle & daub is inhabited by mysterious and peculiar creatures. A woman who fears the living thing in her apartment walls. An office-based streaker with an axe to grind. Automatons that finally recognize their creator. A terminally ill man resorting to hypnotism to quit smoking. The couple who conceive an alarm clock. A dying brain unspooling receding memories of a funfair…

With ear-dizzying force, the stories in this debut collection meld and stretch into truly new directions. Every page is mined with humor, sympathy, and blistering language that mark Brian Coughlan as a unique fabricator of short tales. - courtesy of Etruscan Press

Wattle and daub in the actual sense is a building material, consisting of a network of interwoven sticks (wattle) and twigs covered with mud or clay (daub). Several manifestations of this idea, from the very literal to the quite figurative, were presented to the author, and the choice of an abstracted typographic solution was an exciting way to encase an eclectic collection of stories.