Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner is an American postmodernist author.
Leyner employs an intense and unconventional style in his works of fiction. His stories are generally humorous and absurd: In The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Mark's father survives a lethal injection at the hands of the New Jersey penal system, and so is freed but must live the remainder of his life in fear of being executed, at New Jersey's discretion, in any situation and regardless of collateral damage. They frequently incorporate elements of meta-fiction: In the same novel, an adolescent Mark produces a film adaptation of the story of his father's failed execution, although he reads a newspaper review of the movie to the prison's warden, and then dies, before even leaving the prison. At the sentence level, Leyner uses sprawling imagery and an extravagant vocabulary, bordering on prose poetry.
Leyner has also worked as a columnist for Esquire and George magazines, and as a writer for the MTV program Liquid Television. He also co-wrote and voiced a short-lived series of audio fiction called Wiretap.
Leyner is most famously critiqued in David Foster Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." Despite this and appearances on David Letterman, Leyner remains a cult figure, though this may change as he switches over to the higher profile world of television development. (He has not written any novels for quite some time, presumably in order to devote more time to this new medium.)
Recently Leyner has collaborated with Dr. Billy Goldberg on three humorous, though fact-based, books on medicine.
He is credited with co-authoring the screenplay of War, Inc.
“It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen...”
“Are the Gods real or is Ike Karton just crazy? And the answer is: Yes.”
“...Someone can intentionally fake blindness for some secondary gain (malingering)--a prisoner who says he can't see in order to try to avoid going directly to jail. It is not difficult to figure out when patients say they are blind but can actually see. We have a simple test that lets us determine whether the eyes are functioning. Using a rotating striped drum, we test for something called optokinetic nystagmus. as the drum spins, normal eyes will be seen moving back and forth.If a striped rotating drum is not available, you can always use a picture of J. Lo's rear. Move it back and forth, and any normal eyes will follow.”
“studies have failed to find anysubstantial evidence proving a relationship between sugar consumption and hyperactivity.”
“I was an infinitely hot and dense dot.”
“Yo! You’re my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I’d have asked for it, Motherfucker!”
“You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it's no one's business that you've shrunk your parents and keep them in a terranium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that's a diary you're producing from your cleavage, I'm leaving.”
“On our last mission - our "final exam" - we were airlifted to a remote region, and we parachuted directly into a hostile enclave. We had to subdue the enemy using hand-to-hand tactics like tae kwon do and pugil sticks, cut their hair in styles appropriate to their particular face shapes, and give them perms.”
“Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the /impudence!/ We have /nothing/ in this life of suffocating obligation but our own motherfucking impudence! For God's sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!”
“We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!”