Welcome to Mark Leyner's America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and anabolic steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Here is fiction the brain can dance to, by one of the funniest and most subversive young writers of this, or any other, decade.
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My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
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From Publishers Weekly
These 17 loosely linked short stories are intelligent, funny and incredibly bizarre. Though not all are science fiction, each displays a supercharged cyberpunk writing style jam-packed with elements of tabloid journalism, bits of advertising slogans, references to kung fu films, literary allusions, television trivia, deadpan non sequiturs, puns and poetry. The fiercely imaginative Leyner ( I Smell Esther Williams ) announces: "Dad was in the basement centrifuging mouse spleen hybridoma, when I informed him that I'd enrolled at the Wilford Military Academy of Beauty." He also discusses the difficulty of finding a haberdashery near the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries shipyard and speculates on a televised encounter between Tennessee's youngest member of the House of Representatives and 17th-century metaphysician Baruch Spinoza. Squads of displaced, armed and dangerous combatants inhabit a young boy's bedroom in the marvelous "In the Kingdom of Boredom, I Wear the Royal Sweatpants." It's an exuberant, adventurous and audacious collection. Some of the pieces were originally published in Esquire, Harper's and Fiction International , among other magazines.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"I really, really liked it. It's like nothing else. I laughed out loud in the bathroom." -- David Byrne
Welcome to Mark Leyner's America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Welcome to a wildly post-Einsteinian fictional universe where the locals include a speech pathologist with a waterbug fetish, a kamikaze airline pilot, and the lead singer for Brazil's most notoriously nihilistic samba band.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is fiction the brain can dance to, by one of the funniest and most subversive young writers of this or any other decade.
"Most current fiction is as well made and exciting as floral wallpaper; but here is a writer willing to decorate the room with the contents of his own dynamited head."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Reading this is like fishing in some hallucinated lake of the subconscious. No telling what term, idea, or thing you'll pull up next."
-- Houston Post
Welcome to Mark Leyner's America, where you can order gallium arsenide sushi at a roadside diner, get loaded on a cocktail of growth hormones and steroids, and support your habit by appearing on TV game shows. Welcome to a wildly post-Einsteinian fictional universe where the locals include a speech pathologist with a waterbug fetish, a kamikaze airline pilot, and the lead singer for Brazil's most notoriously nihilistic samba band.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is fiction the brain can dance to, by one of the funniest and most subversive young writers of this or any other decade.
"Most current fiction is as well made and exciting as floral wallpaper; but here is a writer willing to decorate the room with the contents of his own dynamited head."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Reading this is like fishing in some hallucinated lake of the subconscious. No telling what term, idea, or thing you'll pull up next."
-- Houston Post
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Paperback
In a world of hate and war, we must take a look back on this book. "My Cousin" was the first book by Leyner I read.
And, I still read it. This tome of delightful, poetic anarchy is not for everyone; But, if you can be distracted by the rantings of a stick figure in a Jhonen Vasquez comic, then this should definetly be a treat for you.
I recommend "Enter The Squirrel".
And, I still read it. This tome of delightful, poetic anarchy is not for everyone; But, if you can be distracted by the rantings of a stick figure in a Jhonen Vasquez comic, then this should definetly be a treat for you.
I recommend "Enter The Squirrel".
I say "Ole`!" to this author. (That's a good thing.) And, I recommend this book to everyone I meet, pass by, or steal from.
My rating?
Two fists up.
By Eric Hamen
Format:Paperback
Remember how hard you laughed at "Without Feathers" by Woody Allen? You'll laugh that hard again. That is, unless you're a frustrated English lit professor wannabe. Then you'll find it pretentious and pointless. Who cares. It's still the funniest prose I've ever read and the funniest of all of Leyner's books.
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I must ask your indulgence for a brief autobiographical anecdote (it is relevant). When I was seventeen-years-old, I was an aspiring author, and this was one of my favorite books, along with Henry Miller's BLACK SPRING. MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST, I thought, expanded language to the breaking point. Flash-forward ten years later. I found a jaundiced copy of this book in my parents' basement, along with BLACK SPRING, and re-read both during a week-long visit.
Was I ever THAT young????
My impressions had changed radically. The book now seemed infantile to me: it is nothing more, really, than a frivolous, badly strung-together collection of verbal sound-bites. The book is superficial and hollow at its core. Now, I'm not a fan of transcendental meanings or linear narratives, but, FOR GOD'S SAKE or for the sake of WHOMEVER, even experimental fiction should have at least SOME formal consistency. The surrealists' experiments (one thinks of SOLUBLE FISH or THE MAGNETIC FIELDS) or the work of Alfred Jarry all have an internal logic. This book has none. It is completely meaningless and disjointed.
In fact, the book is a mess: a hastily written, blithe little throwaway of a book.
MY COUSIN, MY GASTROENTEROLOGIST is pure entertainment, nothing more. If that is all you are interested in, so be it. But if that is the case, then you must accept that there is ESSENTIALLY nothing to distinguish this book from an episode of the TV show, FRIENDS, except that the latter is probably more memorable.
This book belongs on the shelf next to BLACK SPRING, a much more "illustrious" book (if only because it was reviewed by Maurice Blanchot), but also one that suffers from a similar disorder.
I've given this book two stars only because to give it one would be to demean my prior self.
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3.4 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as his others
I was a little disapointed in this one. Not as good as Et Tu, Babe, and Tooth Imprints on a Corndog. I guess his later work is the best.
Published on April 23 2003
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disapointing
He is one of the best writers in America, but this one is definitely not as good as 'Tooth Imprints on a Corndog' or 'Et Tu, Babe.' Get the others first. Read more
Published on April 22 2003 by John Doe
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sometimes it's not the plot....
In the hyperkinetic style of writing, one Leyner has been doing for well over a decade now you have to take what happens as a fever dream or the author inviting you into his acid... Read more
Published on April 15 2003 by x_bruce
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fiction on crack
My visual arts analogy for the experience of reading this book: Take a can of Andy Warhol Campbell's soup, open it, and splatter it in maniacal fashion all over a wall, then lick... Read more
Published on Feb 15 2003 by Sam Bickens
1.0 out of 5 stars
Drained
A frantic, hasty novella with no insight into the human condition as a whole, or the individual as a thinking, breathing being. Read more
Published on May 14 2002
1.0 out of 5 stars
Frantic Garbage, Rarely Redeemed
I'll take a good laugh anytime, but the flashes of humor sprinkled throughout this wimpy book do little to rekindle my interest in what reads more like the back of a cereal box... Read more
Published on Aug 12 2001 by Jason P. Gubbels
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL !
yES, i KNOW YOU MAY THINK IT'S A BIT OF A BLOATED STATEMENT, BUT THIS IS MOST DEFINITELY THE (TRIED AND TRUE, WRAPPED IN PLASTIC DESERT BLUE...jeans) great, great American Novel. Read more
Published on May 22 2001 by Josef K
2.0 out of 5 stars
Wannabe
Pseudo-hip, pseudo-funny. I thought I would like this novel, because I have liked Leyner's writing for Esquire. I was disappointed. Read more
Published on May 9 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is a very funny book.
This is a very funny book. I liked it very much. It's likereading William Burroughs, minus the ( ) sex, which is a plus. Read more
Published on Oct 13 2000 by Richard Wladkowski
1.0 out of 5 stars
Hey Snooty i don't get it
I used to read Mark Leyner's column in the back of Esquire and laughed out loud every time... funny insightful cutting... So I bought this book... but I just didn't get it. Read more
Published on Oct 5 2000 by "kiwi1998"
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