My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: A Novel by Mark Leyner

Product Details

Synopsis

This book is fiction the brain can dance to, by one of the funniest and most subversive young writers of this or any other decade.

Annotation

A parable of life in the age of media driven information overload. Images and references from the tv/movie/mass circulation network fly through its pages.

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. (Apr.)