My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

by Mark Leyner

Overview

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. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679745792
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/10/1995
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	1st Vintage Contemporaries ed
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	646,391
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Mark Leyner is the author of two novels, Et Tu, Babe and The Tetherballs of Bougainville; two collections of stories, I Smell Esther Williams and Other Stories and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; and a collection of fiction, plays, and journalism, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New Republic, George, and Harper’s.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly