The Decade's Best Blurbs

Months before a book is published, editors send galleys to writers, academics, experts — anyone — who might read the book and then be willing to write a few sentences praising it, thus encouraging book browsers to purchase it. Work in the publishing industry, and you learn quickly how small and inbred the system is — often back-of-the-book blurb writers are friends or colleagues of the author, or they owe a favor, or expect a favor, of the author.

In keeping with the tone of the rest of "The Neil Pollack Anthology of American Literature," the blurbs found on the back of the book — below a macho faux-photo of Neil Pollack striding away from a battle scene, pen in hand — perfectly and brilliantly parodies blurbs, those who write them and the famous writers whose names he appropriates.

Neil Pollack's words are fists. American fists. He beats us senseless even as we wallow in his majesty. Without him, boredom would swallow the Republic whole.
— Norman Mailer

Pollack has rescued journalism and stitched up the festering near-corpse of American letters. His reporting steers us from the chasm.
— Hunter S. Thompson

Pollack is the foremost chronicler of African-American experience.
— Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)