Book Standard columnist (and Bookslut.com proprietor) Jessa Crispin writes about the mysterious process by which some books manage to stand out from the pack enough to snag her attention. And for at least one title — Canadian novelist Jeffrey Moore’s The Memory Artists — it seems that the old standbys of cover art and blurbs really do work — or at least they did for Crispin. “Bright and shimmery, it was hard to miss coming out of the box. I gave it a second look and immediately fell for the blurb. Not so much for what it said— ‘almost absurdly inventive’ —but for who said it. I had never seen, or at least noticed, a blurb by David Mitchell before, and I tend not to be someone who cares for blurbs. Pat Conroy has blurbed Jonathan Carroll, for God’s sake. But if David Mitchell liked it that much, how could it possibly be bad? Within a few pages, I was completely addicted.”

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