A Shimmering, Serrated Monster! - by Mark Leyner (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

"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

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 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.