by Sam Lipsyte
First published 2024
Mark Leyner sits at his desk, crafting sentences that bend reality into impossible shapes. His mind produces stories where gastroenterologists become cosmic forces and sugar-frosted mythology collides with modern absurdity. This collection pulls together the best pieces from his thirty-year career, starting with his early novels My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe, then moving through his later works The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack and The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit. Contemporary writers offer their thoughts on each section, while Leyner himself contributes new material including a personal timeline and an afterword. His prose operates like a fever dream, mixing high culture with pop references, medical terminology with mythological figures. The writing refuses to follow normal narrative rules, instead creating a world where anything can happen and usually does. For readers seeking fiction that explodes conventional boundaries, this volume captures an author who has influenced countless contemporary novelists with his completely original approach to storytelling.
Genres: literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: lyrical, thought-provoking, whimsical
Tropes: reality-bending, unconventional-narrative
Period: 30-Year-Career
460 pages · Kindle Edition · Little, Brown and Company