The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Wordle Anatomy of Gary Stheyngart Blurbs

Gary Shteyngart might have authored a few books and earned himself a Moby Award for best book trailer, but his true claim to fame seems to be a much more intricate form of literary art: the book blurb. So prolific is his blurbery that Brooklyn-based writer Jacob Silverman decided to have some fun with it and launched The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart, “a catalogue of promiscuous praise.”

Naturally, I decided to in turn have my own quick-and-dirty fun with it, collected the text from all the blurbs to date, and dropped them into Wordle for a good old-fashioned weighted typographic footprint of Shteyngart’s veneration vocabulary:

Apparently, he likes his books funny, patriotic, and written by people named Jennifer or Adam.

Next, perhaps a bored geek might find some joy in putting together an algorithmic Gary Shteyngart Blurb Generator, in the style of the Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator?


Published February 9, 2012

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/02/09/gary-stheyngart-blurbs/

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