We don’t spend as much time as we should on what we like to call modern pulp, but we very much like contemporary artist Owen Smith, so above and below are some of his unique, pulp-style covers for The New Yorker magazine. He also created two brilliant Dashiell Hammett posters that we shared back in 2009, and you can see more from him on his website.

These may look like new Dashiell Hammett book covers, but they’re actually promotional posters painted by the brilliant Owen Smith for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Art on Market Street 2008 Program. If you read our post on author Daniel Chavarría you know we love Smith’s work. When we see it we immediately think pulp, but we aren’t particularly reminded of any other pulp artist’s work. To be fair, we don’t know if Smith considers himself a pulp artist, but we do think his paintings are lurid and mysterious in way that make them a fit for the genre.

Moving on from the Hammett pieces, the painting chosen for the cover of Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Neccesary? is also great, though we don’t think it belongs on a collection of essays. Below that, The Forgotten Arm is an Aimee Mann album, and the pairing is also a bitsquare peg/round hole. If it has to be music, we’d rather see Smith’s work on a José James cd; if on a book, then where better than on the next James Ellroy? But the art remains brilliant regardless, and we look forward to Smith’s future creations. You can see more here, and the write-up we mentioned on Chavarría is here.

Uruguayan author Daniel Chavarría was a miner, a model, and a museum guide, before landing in Cuba and launching a literary career. He’s since won the Dashiell Hammett Award for his novel Gijón and the Edgar Award for Adios Muchachos. His fiction is political, comical, and suspenseful, but most of all it is palpably tropical, the product of a languid and overheated island where material riches are few but passions run high. Read Chavarría and you’ll immediately perceive the difference between fiction written by foreign authors who maybe spend six weeks in Cuba, and a man who has lived there for decades and calls it home. For instance, what foreign author could hope to explain the concept of bicycle hookers, and all the subtleties associated with their trade? Chavarría does exactly that in Adios Muchachos. In fact, he writes primarily about hookers. They’re his obsession, his muses, and he depicts them both unflinchingly and reverently. We won’t tell you more—except that we very much enjoyed the above two books. The English versions commissioned from Carloz Lopez and the award winning translator Peter Bush have all the flavor of the originals. And as a bonus, illustrator Owen Smith’s cover paintings serve as perfect encapsulations of the strange, dark beauty of Chavarría’s prose. More on Smith later.