About the Book
The blazingly inventive fictional autobiography of Mark Leyner, one of America's "rare, true original voices" (Gary Shteyngart). Dizzyingly brilliant, raucously funny, and painfully honest, Gone with the Mind is the story of Mark Leyner's life, told as only Mark Leyner can tell it. In this utterly unconventional novel -- or is it a memoir? -- Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a New Jersey shopping mall. The "audience" consists of Mark's mother and some stray Panda Express employees, who ask a handful of questions. The action takes place entirely at the food court, but the territory covered in these pages has no bounds. A joyride of autobiography, cultural critique, DIY philosophy, biopolitics, video games, demagoguery, and the most intimate confessions, Gone with the Mind is both a soulful reckoning with mortality and the tender story of the relationship between a complicated mother and an even more complicated son. At once nostalgic and acidic, deeply humane, and completely surreal, Gone with the Mind is a work of pure, hilarious genius.
About the Author :
Mark Leyner is the author of the novels Gone with the Mind, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu, Babe; and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller Why Do Men Have Nipples?. Leyner cowrote the movie War, Inc. He currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Mark Leyner is the author of the novels Gone with the Mind, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu, Babe; and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller Why Do Men Have Nipples?. Leyner cowrote the movie War, Inc. He currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey. Peter Ganim, an Earphones Award-winning narrator, is an American actor who has appeared on stage, on television, and in film. He has performed voice-over work since 1994.
Review :
"[Leyner] is either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent."
-- "New York Times Book Review, praise for the author"
"Dazzling, hilarious, heartfelt, and entirely mind-blowingly original, Mark Leyner's fictional memoir Gone with the Mind confirms the author's status as one of the most singular, wild-ass, and brilliantly fearless voices in American literature...There isn't a convention Mark Leyner does not shatter, nor an aspect of twenty-first century culture...he does not reexamine and render fresh. Quite possibly the first literary work of genius, comic and otherwise, of the new millennium."
-- "Jerry Stahl, Pushcart Prize-winning author"
"Leyner writes with one eye on the critical wolves, tossing out proof of his considerable erudition and formal prowess and occasionally rendering a truly tender moment just to show you he knows how to do it. He demonstrates how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left behind, proving that fiction can be robust, provocative, and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
Dazzling, hilarious, heartfelt and entirely-mind-blowingly-original, Mark Leyner's fictional memoir, Gone With The Mind, confirms the author's status as one of the most singular, wild-ass and brilliantly fearless voices in American literature. In prose that is equal parts Roth, Joyce, Scientific American and the Marx Brothers, Gone With The Mind delineates the deep soul and life story of man staring down the barrel of mortality-in the food court of a New Jersey mall. There isn't a convention Mark Leyner does not shatter, nor an aspect of 21st century culture-from robot rape to first person shooter games-he does not reexamine and render fresh. Quite possibly the first literary work of genius-comic and otherwise-of the new millennium.-- "Jerry Stahl"
