Mark Leyner


Mark Leyner is an American postmodernist author.

Career

Leyner employs an intense and unconventional style in his works of fiction. His stories are generally humorous and absurd, with bizarre juxtapositions of people, places and things reminiscent of a Mad Lib. Leyner incorporates many medical references throughout his work.
In The Tetherballs of Bougainville, Mark's father survives a lethal injection at the hands of the New Jersey penal system, and so is freed but must live the remainder of his life in fear of being executed, at New Jersey's discretion, in any situation and regardless of collateral damage. They frequently incorporate elements of meta-fiction: In the same novel, an adolescent Mark produces a film adaptation of the story of his father's failed execution, although he reads a newspaper review of the movie to the prison's warden, and then dies, before even leaving the prison. At the sentence level, Leyner uses sprawling imagery and an extravagant vocabulary, bordering on prose poetry.
Leyner has also worked as a columnist for Esquire and George magazines, and as a writer for the MTV program Liquid Television. He also co-wrote and voiced a short-lived series of audio fiction called Wiretap.
Leyner also studied with noted post-modern author Steve Katz at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Life

During the 1990s, Leyner was a resident of Hoboken, New Jersey, together with his dog Carmella.
In the mid-to-late 2000s, Leyner collaborated with Dr. Billy Goldberg on three humorous, though fact-based, books on medicine.
He is credited with co-authoring the screenplay of War, Inc.
In 2012, Leyner published his first novel in fourteen years, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.

Selected works