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Biography
American

Mark Leyner

1956

Mark Leyner is an American novelist whose hyperkinetic, media-saturated, chemically enhanced fiction — particularly Et Tu, Babe (1992) and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) — defined a strain of American literary culture in the early 1990s: maximalist, ironic, pop-culture-soaked, and deliberately over-the-top. He influenced David Foster Wallace, who wrote a famous essay about him, and a generation of writers who grew up on MTV and advertising.

Past sales0
PeriodContemporary
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Mark Leyner (b. 1956) was born on 4 January 1956 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He studied at Brandeis University and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Life and Career

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) — a collection of short fictions that read like channel-surfing through a fever dream of bodybuilding, pharmacology, fast food, and television — was his breakthrough. Et Tu, Babe (1992) — in which “Mark Leyner,” a celebrity author, lives a life of absurd excess — established him as the literary id of 1990s America.

David Foster Wallace wrote an influential essay about Leyner (“E Unibus Pluram,” 1993), arguing that his work represented the logical endpoint of irony in American fiction. Wallace’s own work was partly a response to Leyner — an attempt to move beyond irony toward sincerity.

The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1997) was a faux memoir. The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (2012) — about a man on a stoop in Jersey City narrating a creation myth — returned after a long silence. Gone with the Mind (2016) was a monologue delivered to an empty food court.

He also co-wrote Why Do Men Have Nipples? (2005), a bestselling humour/science book.

Key Works

  • Et Tu, Babe (1992)
  • My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990)
  • The Sugar Frosted Nutsack (2012)

Collecting Leyner

My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990, Harmony Books) brings $15–$30.