Very P - The reckless art of book blurbing

Ghetta Life ghetta_outta at hotmail.com
Thu May 4 09:44:07 CDT 2006


http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/blurbs.html

"Used to be, the most compelling words of any given book were found between 
the covers. But lately, I find myself increasingly distracted by the words 
on the jacket. If you pick up Adverbs, the latest work of fiction by Daniel 
Handler, you’ll find this fanatical rave from Dave Eggers: “Adverbs 
describes adolescence, friendship, and love with such freshness and power 
that you feel drunk and beaten up, but still want to leave your own world 
and enter the one Handler’s created. Anyone who lives to read gorgeous 
writing will want to lick this book and sleep with it between their legs.”

Reading Adverbs, I felt no such impulse. But perhaps that’s a personal 
shortcoming — maybe I don’t feel books as intensely as Eggers. At any rate, 
he exercises creative licence the way most of us exercise our lungs. The 
linchpin of the McSweeney’s publishing empire and the author of three books, 
Eggers may be the leading advocate of literary hijinks. Take his bestselling 
2000 book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Part memoir, part 
fictionalization of real events and part annotated text on what meaning the 
reader should derive from it all, Eggers’s opus was the work of a militant 
postmodernist. That weird sensibility has begun to inform Eggers’s (many) 
blurbs."

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! 
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/




More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list