QUILLBLOG

The art of the selective blurb, or, “The most … important … Quillblog post … [in] history!”

When it comes to finding something blurb-worthy within a negative review of a book, some publicists are like brilliant surgeons, delicately extracting strings of positive-sounding words from the malignant growth of criticism that surrounds them. As Henry Alford writes in a New York Times article on what he dubs “misblurbing,” sometimes even just one word will do:

It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel Thirteen Moons that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

It happened to me about 10 years ago. I had called David Sedaris’s memoir Naked a “tour-de-farce” in a review in Newsday. Shortly thereafter, the publisher ran an ad in which my 600-word review had been boiled down to one phrase: “tour de force.”

But what if there are no positive words in the review? In that case, as the Arts Journal‘s Scott McLemee discovered, the solution is to simply say the whole review was positive. McLemee had reviewed the hardcover edition of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics – fairly harshly, he thought. So he was surprised to discover his review referred to in the paperback edition as “largely positive.”

Now, it’s true that I seldom reread my work after it is published, and tend to forget what I’ve written pretty quickly once the last revision is done. (Forward ever, backward never.) But this reference to the review as “largely positive” certainly came as a surprise, for I do have some recollection of the book, and it is not a fond one.

McLemee then excerpts large sections of his review, prefacing it with “Good luck to any publicist trying to extract a blurb-able nugget from this.”

But they can, Scott, they can.