Next April, Stalking Horse Press will publish My Painted Smile, the new novel by Matthew Binder. We’re pleased to reveal the book’s cover today, along with statements by Binder and publisher James Reich. Here’s part of the publisher’s description of the book:
“After his mother’s suicide, young Victor is sold by his father to the Pogey O’Malley Circus, an 1870s traveling wagon show populated by a Lothario sword swallower, warring Siamese twins, an Alligator Boy, the world’s strongest woman, and a narcissistic lion tamer. Among these friends and enemies, Victor stumbles through muck and heartbreak on his improbable rise from stable boy to celebrated clown.”
Matthew Binder
Years ago, while flipping through a book of collected letters, I came across a missive from an old circus clown to his estranged daughter. When he was a kid, he’d written, his parents couldn’t afford to care for him, so they sold him to the circus, hoping he might have a better life.
In My Painted Smile, that premise became the story of Victor, a boy sold by his father to the Pogey O’Malley Circus, where he rises from stable boy to celebrated clown, even as his longing for the ringmaster’s daughter curdles into obsession.
For the cover art, I’d initially hoped to license a hundred-year-old image from Circus Knie, Switzerland’s national circus. When I lost interest in that approach, I asked my publisher to commission a painting from a friend. But we couldn’t find a shared vision, and for a time I was at a loss.
Now, I’m not a good painter. In fact, I’m not a painter at all, because I don’t paint. But during the first months of Covid, for reasons I still can’t explain, I made about a hundred small paintings over the span of a few weeks, mostly of churches, cemeteries, motels, and a few portraits, on pieces of cardboard from HelloFresh boxes. Given that I’d never painted a stroke in my life till then, the paintings were unsophisticated and not technically “good,” but they possessed a certain naïve quality that some people seemed to like. And for some reason, I felt compelled to bring a box of them with me when I moved to Switzerland a couple years ago.
I remembered one particular portrait I painted. It was different from anything else I had made. At the time, I didn’t even like it very much. But years later, after I’d finished My Painted Smile, it reminded me of my beleaguered protagonist, Victor. Luckily, it was one of the paintings I had dragged along with me when I moved across the Atlantic.
Originally, the background was lavender, but I thought it seemed a little too gentle-feeling, so I repainted it a darker plum. The only thing missing was Victor’s horseshoe-shaped scar from being kicked by a horse, so I painted that onto his cheek as well.
It still took some work by James Reich at Stalking Horse Press to convince me that we should use the painting for the cover. I had doggedly worked on the book for years. In fact, my obsession with it caused me to blow up my life, and I’m only now beginning to put the pieces back together. Knowing that people tend to judge books by their covers, I felt uneasy about using a painting that had taken me no longer than the time it takes to finish two cans of beer as the cover art for a novel to which I’d given myself completely. But once James showed me the finished cover, the details adjusted and the typeface chosen and set, I realized it didn’t look like any book cover I’d ever seen before. It felt right for such a bizarre book.
James Reich
While we were editing the manuscript of My Painted Smile, I remember talking with Matt about how, for me, other great circus novels like Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus have had a number of covers that struggle to capture the book. For reference ideas, we began sharing paintings by Watteau, Walt Kuhn, Picasso, Büchner, but nothing was quite right. In late June, Matt sent me a photograph of his painting, and I sensed immediately that it had the perfect naïve and forlorn quality that we needed. Suddenly, Victor was right there. Also, it reminded me of the cover of the Geraldine Fibbers album Butch. It was as if Matt had unconsciously painted his book cover before the novel was finished. And you can’t argue with the unconscious.
Matthew Binder’s novel My Painted Smile publishes in April 2027. Paperback and hardcover preorders can be placed from November 1, 2026 here: paperback / hardcover
Matthew Binder is the author of Pure Cosmos Club and The Absolved. Matthew is also one half of the recording project Bang Bang Jet Away.
James Reich is the editor at Stalking Horse Press and the author of several novels, most recently Skinship (Anti-Oedipus Press), and The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books).