Tooth Imprints On A Corn Dog

Product Description

The author of
Et Tu, Babe and
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist returns with another celebratory burst from the automatic weapon of his psyche. Mark Leyner brings us along for his dream date with Princess Di; wholeheartedly recommends the wonderfully lifelike, bendable
This week with David Brinkley action figures; and speculates on the symbolic meanings of the tattoos sported by U.S. senators.

From Publishers Weekly

This hodgepodge of short stories, comic sketches, and one play is in the same fantastic, satirical vein as Leyner’s (Et Tu, Babe) earlier fiction, with its disjointed, slapstick style, its surrealist tricks and its lusty appetite for mass culture, trendy society, low humor and high technology. Yet as Leyner reports here (in a dispatch from his “benthic pied-a-terre/atelier” in the Marianna Trench), he is now a father, and as a result much of this book concerns themes of fertility, childbirth and childcare, as well as anxieties about his new role as bourgeois breadwinner. Among these more or less fictional, often hilarious stories are accounts of Leyner’s attempt to buy an Armani backpack for his daughter’s Haute Barbie ($3450 at Bergdorf Goodman); his reading Rimbaud’s Season in Hell to her (punctuating each line with a loud moo), and other efforts to be a good father “without losing his edge.” The centerpiece is “The Making of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog,” which recounts 36 hours spent in the Chateau Marmont, composing 1000 lines of free verse under deadline to Der Gummiknuppel (“the German equivalent to Martha Stewart Living but with more nudity and grisly crime”). These variations on Leyner’s hallmark hyper-intellectual, amphetamine-feuled, narrative channel-surfing will not surprise his increasing fans; nor will they disappoint.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Leyner’s last book, Et Tu, Babe (Crown, 1993), was, technically, a novel. This collection of essays, some original and some previously published in The New Yorker and the New Republic, is stylistically similar but lacks the ingenious, drop-dead-funny monologs that made Et Tu, Babe a cult classic. Nevertheless, Leyner redeems himself with pieces like “Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown,” a retelling of Hawthorne’s classic novella of the same title (sans the department store reference), and “Dangerous Dads,” an ode to fatherhood that reads like an LSD-enhanced version of Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature (LJ 3/15/90). Leyner has a young and vocal following, so purchase wherever his earlier works circulate.

–Mark Annichiarico, “Library Journal”
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mark Leyner has a unique perspective on the universe, as seen in the stories collected here, which fall somewhere between fiction and what the
New Yorker used to call “casuals”: there’s the title story, which purports to be the diary of writing a 1,000-line epic poem in 24 hours for publication in
Der Gummiknuppel, “the German equivalent of
Martha Stewart Living but with more nudity and grisly crime”; there’s a one-act play about Leyner’s dream date with Princess Di; and there’s an account of a visit to America’s busiest sperm bank. Then there’s “Young Bergdorf Goodman Brown,” a play in which the intrepid Leyner reveals a secret alliance between extraterrestrials and Israel originating in the deepest subbasement of a major department store. Imagine a collaboration between S. J. Perelman and Salvador Dali, and you’ll have some idea of the work of Mark Leyner. This peculiar book is highly recommended for all readers with a healthy sense of the absurd. Don’t forget to check your holdings for Leyner’s earlier, equally bizarre works, including
I Smell Esther Williams (1983) and
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990).
George Needham

From the Inside Flap

f
Et Tu, Babe and
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist returns with another celebratory burst from the automatic weapon of his psyche. Mark Leyner