"Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Alan Levinovitz:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blurb
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Blurb
4 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Blurb →
Related Quotes
"I have blurbed so many books that they fill a bookcase in my apartment."
"Many writers who have hit the best-seller lists or won major awards have a strict policy of not writing blurbs."
"In 2002, I’d finally finished my own decade-long basic science project, and I was getting ready to publish my book A …"
"Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and …"
"When the seas of life get rough, some readers look for escape, while others dive right in. So it is , when many book …"
"People who read tend to commit fewer s, I guess. I think that one of the reasons for that isn’t just that they’re bri…"
"Real life is overrated. But as readers we can escape to any elsewhere our heart desires – and at present all my heart…"
"Such forgeries were common enough... So unenviable was the reputation that priests had acquired in this matter that I…"
"The very best proof of how much writing mattered was the forgeries. Forgery had been an ecclesiastical habit for cent…"
"The present generation has this ingrained weakness, that it thinks that nothing discovered by the moderns is worthy t…"