dubious book promotion

Here’s some notable marketing copy by Wave Books:

"...Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow."

Makes you want to buy the book, doesn't it?

inflated till it pops

His reviews were inflated blurbs, to the point that reading to the end of one you began to wince, sure it was about to burst in your face.

didn't come out that way

After reading the blurb, I thought, he probably means what he says as praise.

there, there, you'll be fine

Some books need those little pats on the back that blurbs give.

book as home

The blurb as real estate ad: Charming yet spacious, ready to move in, well-appointed, recently renovated, with water views.

allowed to float up

Blurble: 'verb' – sound made when you lift a book and turn to the back cover.

hurray-hurray, step right up...

Blurb writers and other carnival barkers of literature.

the power to cow

The function of a blurb is to so overpraise the book that any reader would feel ashamed at being underwhelmed upon reading the book.

no sense of decency

Often after reading a famous poet’s blurb on the back of a poetry book, the attorney Joseph Welsh’s well-known rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy comes to mind: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

a blurb is about

A blurb is about the blurb-writer and not about the book.