Few subjects spark as much book-world gossip as the blurb. Merriam Webster defines the term as “a short publicity notice (as on a book jacket),” attributing it to Gelett Burgess (1866-1951), a San Francisco poet, author, and critic. (Burgess himself described it as “a flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.”) Sometimes banal, sometimes clever, frequently overblown, it is used by publishers to entice readers to pick up and purchase a book. Who blurbed who, and why, is of perennial interest to industry types, not to mention those books that enter the world naked and blurbless. One publicist recently expressed bewilderment on Twitter at a book that had 23 blurbs. But who’s counting?
When I first queried agents about my story collection, I heard this a lot: “These stories are good, but can you link them through a character or a town so I’ll have half a chance at selling this as a book?” Each time, I replied, “Well, the town I’m writing about is America. The character is Black folks. Isn’t that enough?” It wasn’t. One agent who replied within five minutes of me sending a query, clearly without reading my sample, said, “Editors won’t even consider story collections without an obvious link and a novel to go along with it. Let me know when you have both.”
The five-headed monster called The Publishing Industry doesn’t really want our “unlinked” story collections, people. I’m ridiculously lucky Amistad/HarperCollins is publishing mine. I’ll even go a step further: it is the industry that has made people think our beloved “unlinked” story collections are ugly and unsellable. There, I said it. Nowadays, you have to give your fiction a familiar sheen, an obvious link, so the agent, editor, and future reader will want to pick up the book, so it will sell, sell, sell. Unfortunately, no one told me this until it was too late. I was already in love . . . with a zombie, evidently—the traditional “unlinked” story collection.
The notion of seeking out high-quality fathers to sire high-quality kids isn’t new, of course. But the study from Arnqvist’s team adds a layer of complexity to our understanding of the evolutionary carrots and sticks faced by female beetles, who must juggle the immediate cost of genital wounding with the eventual benefit of producing an excellent brood.
Depending on the light, it’s either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story. But no matter how you turn it, “The Vixen” offers an illuminating reflection on the slippery nature of truth in America, then and now.
The memoir refuses genre. Instead, it invents its own radical, striking, fragmented form, which reflects Mohabir’s efforts to mend himself. “I wanted to sit in the negative capability of my Aji’s songs; to learn them to piece my own broken self together.” His stunning original poetry flies abreast of translated Bhojpuri songs. Anti-colonial polemic enlivens prose about his quest for a place his fluid self might move within rigid lines of identity.
From a widow who’s stalked by “the feeling of loneliness, worthlessness,” to a woman living a “misdirected” life, to another who tries to hide the emptiness of her existence behind elaborate lies, to men indulging in casual, drug-fueled hookups behind closed doors, Ridgway writes about people living on various margins, their lives interlocking in the craftiest of ways. What initially looks like a collection of loosely linked short stories reveals itself to be an expertly constructed house of mirrors.