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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Although few taxpayers and legislators care whether the nation's English professors are doing justice to identifying the beautiful and the sublime, conversely the image of English departments plays a major role in determining public attitudes toward colleges and college faculty. Investigating the ramifications of current debates, this book provides the clearest and most comprehensive account of this controversy to date.