Wallace coined the helpful term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about them, they’re literally meaningless.”
Though David Foster Wallace was somewhat skeptical about book blurbs, he wasn’t unlikely to recommend books himself from time to time. Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lucas Thompson tackles this love/hate relationship, and what it’s meant for the literature Wallace did comment on.
