A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!

The Mark Leyner Reader

Contributors

By Mark Leyner

Edited by Rick Kisonak

Foreword by Sam Lipsyte

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$14.99

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$19.99 CAD

An all-access ticket to the celebrated and wholly original mind of Mark Leyner, “one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes” (Jay McInerney)

Praised as “chaotic and vibrant” (Charles Yu), “visionary” (Sam Lipsyte), and “supremely original” (John Cusack), the work of Mark Leyner has inspired a generation of contemporary novelists and has long deserved its place of recognition among the literary superstars of the seismic postmodernism-influenced movement of the early 21st century. A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader samples the staggering highlights from Leyner’s extraordinary career in all of its bizarre and infatuating glory, with excerpts spanning from his groundbreaking early novels My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) and Et Tu, Babe (1992) to his modern masterpieces The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack (2012) and The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit (2021). Appreciations from modern masters introduce each novel and the book includes original pieces in Leyner’s irrepressible voice, including a timeline (“The Story So Far”) and a new Afterword (“The Highlighted Passages”). This comprehensive volume is the perfect entry point for readers attracted to mind-expanding prose, and a bouquet of delights for those who have loved any of his past works.  

  • “Mark Leyner is one of the great satirists . . . one of the great envelope-pushers of language and ideas  . . . If you read him, you’re going to get a f*$%#&* kick out of him. He’s hardcore, raw, transgressive . . . Read a Mark Leyner book.”
    Marc Maron
  • “You can bring me ten contemporary novels with HILARIOUS! stamped all over their covers and I will show you ten pages of Leyner that are funnier than all of them combined."
    Adam Sternbergh, New York Times Magazine
  • "I laughed out loud in the bathroom."
    David Byrne on My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
  • “Leyner is the original charged particle, formally inventive, hilariously funny, completely original. Think Beckett on acid. Read this book.”
    Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair, on Gone With the Mind
  • “Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman, supremely original, deliri-ous and synapse-shattering.”
    John Cusack
  • “Mark Leyner is a mad genius, one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes. A twisted wizard, a genre-busting vir-tuoso, working at the outer edge of narrative convention.”
    Jay McInerney
  • "His books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent...proving that fiction can be robust, provocative and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment."
    Ben Marcus, The New York Times Book Review, on The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

On Sale
Dec 3, 2024
Page Count
464 pages
ISBN-13
9780316591676

The Shimmering Virtual Volume: Bonus Features

Mark Leyner

About the Author

Mark Leyner is the author of the novels and collections I Smell Esther Williams and Other Stories (1983); My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990); Et Tu, Babe (1992); Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog (1996); The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1998); The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack (2012); Gone With the Mind (2016); and The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit (2021). His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller Why Do Men Have Nipples?, and he cowrote the movie War, Inc
 

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Rick Kisonak

About the Author

In 2005 Rick Kisonak launched the Burlington Book Festival and served as its Founding Director until 2020. He was the publisher of Burlington Magazine for two decades and, over the course of 40 years, rose to become a respected voice in the fields of media and film criticism. Featuring a signature mix of insight and humor, his work has appeared in publications and outlets such as Salon, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes, Film Threat and Games Magazine. A longtime member of the prestigious Critics Choice Association, Kisonak hosted the popular entertainment programs Art Patrol, on Vermont’s NBC affiliate WPTZ-TV, and Screen Time with Rick Kisonak, for Mountain Lake PBS in New York. For twenty years he wrote movie reviews for the weekly newspaper Seven Days. Rick lives in South Burlington, Vermont with his wife, daughter and the nagging suspicion that things might have been different if he’d lived in a major market.

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