Thursday, August 21, 2008

The Collected Blurbs of Thomas Pynchon

Rachel Donadio on blurbs (NYTBR):

Sometimes a blurb is news. The reclusive Thomas Pynchon seems to elicit excitement each time he breaks his public silence, as he has by endorsing, among others, “The Testament of Yves Gundron” (1999), the first novel by Emily Barton; Jim Knipfel’s memoir “Slackjaw” (1999); and “The Restraint of Beasts” (1998), a Booker-nominated novel by Magnus Mills, which he called “a demented, deadpan-comic wonder.” (Pynchon has also written the liner notes for “Nobody’s Cool,” the second album by the alt-rock band Lotion.) Recently, Post Road magazine published Pynchon’s collected blurbs from the years 1966 to 2003 — more than two dozen in all.

I love Post Road's occasional aggregations: I recall something about John Cheever characters (or places? in any case, a list of all of them), and I read a great thing featuring the jacket copy (not blurbs, just descriptions) of every Joyce Carol Oates novel.

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