Read This Book Or You'll Wish You Were Dead!
Posted on Friday July 21, 2006 at 11:38am.
At Frank Wilson's blog is a link to a June article by Ruth Franklin about the emptiness of over-the-top book blurbs and book reviews (read the first third of the article). Wilson is the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. We're lucky to have a book editor in town with the good sense to link to an article like this, even though the paper doesn't publish as many original reviews as I'd like (or as many as he would like, I imagine).
Like many readers, I don't like being lied to by the inside-the-industry shills who take turns reviewing each other's books and share cocktails in Manhattan. I like even less that when someone reads something positive in a review of one of my books, they are apt to dismiss the praise, because according to the reviewers and blurb writers, every book out there is supposedly the funniest and most enlightening thing ever printed. To avoid disappointment, there is only one author's blurbs that you should take seriously--mine. In a 2001 review of my first novel, Lost, the Philadelphia Inquirer said:
Like many readers, I don't like being lied to by the inside-the-industry shills who take turns reviewing each other's books and share cocktails in Manhattan. I like even less that when someone reads something positive in a review of one of my books, they are apt to dismiss the praise, because according to the reviewers and blurb writers, every book out there is supposedly the funniest and most enlightening thing ever printed. To avoid disappointment, there is only one author's blurbs that you should take seriously--mine. In a 2001 review of my first novel, Lost, the Philadelphia Inquirer said:
There are a million laughs in the big city, as a sharp-eyed writer shows … Stein has a keen eye for the details of our cultural landscape … wonderfully comic … a page-turner … insightful tweaking of city living and modern times.My new novel, Mean Martin Manning, due out near the end of the year, is far more aggressive, politically incorrect, irreverent, and scathingly satirical than my first novel, and certainly far, far more than most of what you'll find on the new release table at Barnes and Noble. We'll have to wait to see whether it receives excessive praise, faint praise, fiery condemnation (one can hope), or, worst of all, is ignored entirely and not reviewed. The press release announcing the signing of the book deal has been posted by my publisher. The release date of February 2007 is a conservative estimate. It might be in print before the end of the year.