I Smell Esther Williams

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819604
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
A community theater's production of Special Yearnings triggers a string of underground nuclear explosions from St. Louis to Worcester, Massachusetts. A man frantically swats at the blaze that his girlfriend has ignited in his trousers, while her family tries to figure out whether his agonized sign language means "Under the Volcano" or "No Time for Sergeants." Charo, Marianne Faithfull, and Napoleon's sister swap glittering witticisms and pornographic come-ons with languid aesthetes and unhinged suburbanites. Such scenarios are just par for the course in this gloriously disorienting volume by Mark Leyner, author of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu, Babe, and a writer who plays the English language the way Jimi Hendrix played the guitar: at blinding speed, dangerous volume, and with a perfect mixture of lyricism and sheer menace.

I Smell Esther Williams

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679750452
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819612
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
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.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0316192775
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
From the bestselling and wildly imaginative novelist Mark Leyner, a romp through the excesses and exploits of gods and mortals. High above the bustling streets of Dubai, in the world's tallest and most luxurious skyscraper, reside the gods and goddesses of the modern world. Since they emerged 14 billion years ago from a bus blaring a tune remarkably similar to the Mister Softee jingle, they've wreaked mischief and havoc on mankind. Unable to control their jealousies, the gods have splintered into several factions, led by the immortal enemies XOXO, Shanice, La Felina, Fast-Cooking Ali, and Mogul Magoo. Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher from New Jersey, is their current obsession. Ritualistically recited by a cast of drug-addled bards, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is Ike's epic story. A raucous tale of gods and men confronting lust, ambition, death, and the eternal verities, it is a wildly fun, wickedly fast gambol through the unmapped corridors of the imagination.

Some Other Frequency

Author: Larry McCaffery
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214420
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
McCaffery converses with the young, recklessly daring, and furiously productive William Vollmann and with Marianne Hauser, who published her first novel nearly sixty years ago ... with Native American trickster novelist Gerald Vizenor and "guerrilla writer" Harold Jaffe (whose literary technique is to "plant a bomb, sneak away") ... with stark minimalist Lydia Davis and text-and-collage artist Derek Pell ... with muscular pop icon Mark Leyner and proto-punk diva Kathy Acker. They are a diverse lot, shaped by very different literary and personal influences, and addressing divergent readerships.

Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316560480
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A brilliant and utterly original new novel from Mark Leyner about a father and his intense and devout relationship with his daughter and with alcohol. An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capitol of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar, where conversations are actually being read from multiple karaoke screens arrayed around the barroom. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite," when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is a book about the deep pleasures of reading and drinking, the tumultuous reign of a cabal of mystic mobsters, and, of course, the transcendent love of a father for his daughter.

Trials

Author: Martha Merrill Umphrey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351125907
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Book Description
This volume gathers a collection of the most seminal essays written by leading experts in the fields of law, and cultural studies, which address the cultural dimension of trials. Taken together, these essays conceive of trials as sites of legal performance and as critical public spaces in which the law both encounters and interacts dialogically with the culture in which it is embedded. Inquiring into the contours of that dialogic relation, these essays trace the paths of cultural stories as they circulate in and through trial settings, examine how trials emerge out of particular social and historical contexts, and suggest ways in which trials themselves, as both singular events and generic forms, circulate and signify in culture.

Technology and Values

Author: Craig Hanks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1405149000
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Book Description
This anthology features essays and book excerpts on technology and values written by preeminent figures in the field from the early 20th century to the present. It offers an in-depth range of readings on important applied issues in technology as well. Useful in addressing questions on philosophy, sociology, and theory of technology Includes wide-ranging coverage on metaphysics, ethics, and politics, as well as issues relating to gender, biotechnology, everyday artifacts, and architecture A good supplemental text for courses on moral or political problems in which contemporary technology is a unit of focus An accessible and thought-provoking book for beginning and advanced undergraduates; yet also a helpful resource for graduate students and academics

The Tetherballs of Bougainville

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307766039
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
From his cult classic, I Smell Esther Williams, to his wildly popular and insightful column "Wild Kingdom" appearing in Esquire magazine every month, Mark Leyner has been giving us up close and personal encounters of the most hilarious kind for over a decade. Now, in his new novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Leyner shares with us, long last, the quintessential coming of age story that every writer, at some point, is compelled to tell. In the novel we meet young Mark Leyner, 13-years-old to be exact, as he waits in a New Jersey prison to witness his father's execution. Adolescence is never easy, and it just so happens that this junior high schooler is on deadline to turn in a screenplay for which he has already been awarded the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. And, as it was for all of us during out teenage years, nothing seems to go as planned. Written as autobiography, screenplay and movie review, The Tetherballs of Bougainville twists three familiar narrative forms into an outlandishly compelling story. Leyner's use of the media-driven formats brilliantly reflects our secret, shameful and hilarious desire to experience our private lives as mass entertainment. The Tetherballs of Bougainville skewers and celebrates American pop culture in the late twentieth century. Leyner's version of our lives is so deeply funny because it is so painfully true.

Let's Play Doctor

Author: Mark Leyner
Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
ISBN: 030734598X
Category : Medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
The authors of the bestselling series that includes "Why Do Men Have Nipples?" and "Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex?" are back with a hilarious look at what it takes to look, act, and talk like a real doctor.