Gone with the Mind

Right book, right time, without a doubt. I've been experiencing a crisis of faith lately, muddling through a prolonged reading slump really only momentarily broken by KOKMS5. Getting 100 pages into long burly novels and bailing on them or "putting them aside." And then along comes the latest Mark Le......more

I almost forgot how much I love Leyner and how fun he is to read. This one is as meta as Et Tu, Babe, but is sort of attitudely the opposite. Here we have Mark still living life as an accomplished writer but finds him reading to virtually no one at a mall food court reading series. Refreshingly ridi......more

Mark Leyner is a fascinating experimentalist. In his early writing, I thought of him as a comic absurdist, such as in his amazing short stories in My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist. And there is still some of that lingering in his work, there are moments of humor no doubt, but now they are embedded w......more

"There's nothing more dispiriting for a writer than to have traveled hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles to give a reading, and then find him- or herself facing rows of empty seats," declares Muriel Leyner, the author's mother, on the opening page of Mark Leyner's goofy and profound fourth novel,......more