Last week, Sean Manning, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, announced that it would no longer “require” authors to procure blurbs for their books. This news came just ...

An announcement from Simon & Schuster’s publisher left the literary community wondering whether blurbs, the little snippets of praise on a book jacket, are all they’re cracked up to be.

If people were going to see the blurb, they first had to enter a bookshop and browse the shelves. What percentage of book-buyers still do that? Then I found, to my horror, that in certain ...

Searing. Volatile. That’s how Sean Manning felt about the prattle on every second book cover. Even those he’d published, where a novel looked naked without such blurb cliches as uproarious ...