Blurbs I’d Like to See
“This book threw me to the floor, naked and racist, desperately gasping for air. A work that could truly only have come from [author’s name]’s extended pregnancy.” – Harper’s
“Bubbling with humility.” – The Independent
“<;-)” – Cynthia Ozick
“The Justin Taylor of the fixed gear scooter generation. Joshua Cohen for your gay Jewish nephew. Just because you don’t get it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The codes of these satin pages will bleed you dry with their suggestive, yet ultimately fustian, message. Not to be missed by any fans of Bearbaiting: 2100.” – Paul Auster’s great-great-granddaughter
“If films are the new books, this book is an old film. [Author’s name] tucks you silently into bed and turns out the light on charity.” – New York Times
“[A blurb by a hotdog].” – a hotdog at Gray’s Papaya (6th Ave/8th St. location)
“My girlfriend loved your TV show when you used to have one.” – The Guardian
“Like fingernails across the chalkboard of a Brooklyn coffee-shop. Like music played on a broken giraffe’s carcass. [Author’s name] has given us a gift more permanent than HIV/AIDS, more lasting than the Lincoln assassination, and your kids will be talking about it long after you’ve become the bigot.” – Muareen Corrigan (for NPR)
“An invalid wakes at dawn with a banana-clip necklace. This novel won’t tell you the answer to any age old question, but it may find you choking on a half eaten bagel on the city bus.” – Frank Peretti
“If Nabokov, Updike, Lish, and Baker suffered from psoriasis, [author’s name] can be said to have eczema.” – The Millions
“I was left with a tacit boner.” – Erik Stinson
Don’t write all over the goddamn books please.
I hate blurbs on book covers, at least put that shit on the back if it’s all you can do you think you have to to sell your shit and maybe you’re right, I’m no good at selling it. A terrible telemarketer, I would probably make a mediocre regional fertilizer salesman, which is to say I would be shitty at selling shit. So you go on building bridges and stuff. I mean I get it. It’s silly but I’m better at burning them britches. What I like is to consume my brain food from a plain colored box, like an Oreo milkshake, or expensive yogurt the way Muslims frown on figure drawing in the mosque. I think that’s rad. Frown away Mohammad. Patterns are whatever. Pyramids are when. They are good to think on I think. I like to gaze at them and think on Gawd oh gawd the stars the trees. But my kind of cover is a naked Knopf hardbound from the 60s. Maybe I’m boring and probably it’s vain but I don’t want other people’s opine opinions influencing my internal dialogue, not until I’ve digested my lunch which is to say eaten the text the film the album the thing and pooped out an opinion of some kind, however odd it might look oblong and oblique, not until I’ve had time to play with it to prod it to scrape and slice it beneath the blade of my tongue. But I like first for a thing to be in space like a rock in the ground pulsing tight 600 million miles a fucking hour going this is True btw, and then to have it there in my mouth in my ears my eyes huge like a fresh batch of fungus, a bunch of firecrackers going off in my bulb my skull my head. My favorite thing said in French is J’ai mal à la tête. To think of it rolls off the tongue like butter on bread.
Blake Butler—
Things to not say in blurbs or reviews so as to not sound like a tool: tour de force, startling, bad adverb + adjectives like furiously alive or wildly inventive or utterly involving, triumphant, [last name] swings for the fences, like [blank] on crack, like [blank] on LSD, romp, rollicking, breathless, a unique voice, poignant, sexy (horny is OK), well-wrought, death rattle, tongue fart doublespeak like dizzyingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, any reference to Dada or surrealism, any employment of the phrase experimental, neo-anything, any vague or direct use of the phrase meditation such as resonant meditations, “[last name] really sings,” cautionary tale, anything about Kafka or Carver or Bukowski, any reconjuring of the phrase reminds us what it is to be human…
112