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Et Tu, Babe
In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve around him.
Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.
Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.
175 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
40 people are currently reading
1679 people want to read
About the author
Mark Leyner
28 books337 followersMark Leyner is an American postmodernist author known for his surreal, high-energy prose, absurd humor, and densely layered narratives. A graduate of Brandeis University and the University of Colorado, Leyner studied under postmodernist Steve Katz and launched his literary career with the short story collection I Smell Esther Williams (1983). He gained a cult following with My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) and Et Tu, Babe (1992), and continued to experiment with metafiction in novels like The Tetherballs of Bougainville and The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. His writing is characterized by sprawling imagery, extravagant vocabulary, and a wild mix of pop culture, medicine, and satire. Leyner’s nonfiction collaborations with Dr. Billy Goldberg, including Why Do Men Have Nipples?, became bestsellers that blended comedy and real medical facts. He has also worked as a columnist for Esquire and George, written for MTV’s Liquid Television, and co-authored the screenplay for War, Inc.. A lifelong innovator, Leyner has remained a singular voice in American fiction. His more recent books include Gone with the Mind, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, and the 2024 retrospective A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader. He lives in New Jersey and continues to influence readers and writers with his singular, genre-defying style.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 186 reviews
April 19, 2025
I liked this one a lot better than My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist and a bit better than The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, but not quite as much as The Tetherballs of Bougainville, so I'm giving it 4.5 stars, rounded up because DEAL WITH IT.
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March 22, 2014In this book, at least, Mark Leyner is a late 20th century Hennie Youngman. Who the hell is Hennie Youngman, you ask? If you aren't older than dirt, you may well ask. Monsieur Youngman was a stand up comedian whose schtick was telling an infinite number of 2- or 3-line jokes in an extremely rapid-fire manner; almost all of them were as old as he was, but there were so many that a few were funny, by accident.
Like I said, Mark Leyner is a late 20th century Hennie Youngman, at least in this book. Many, many short pieces of straining hipster hyperbole rapidly go by. Here's one, in toto:
Dear Editors at Swank,
Your article on the sensitive areolas of large-breasted women was excellent. Also, thanks for the recipe of paella valenciana that you published in the October Swank. I'm no gourmet chef, but I made the dish for my girlfriend and after dinner she couldn't keep her prosthetic hands off of my veiny nine-inch chorizo.
Yes, I know, irony...
But, sometimes, there is a somewhat funny bit:
-Do you believe in God?
-Yes, sir.
-Do you believe in an anthropomorphic, vengeful, capricious God who can look down on one man and give him fabulous riches and look down on another and say "you're history" and give him a cerebral hemorrhage?
-Yes, sir.
But then, moments later, comes something like this:
-My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a nobleman in Spain in the fifteenth century and it was he who first discovered that the atomized saliva of hunchbacks enhances the growth of flowers. He, in fact, retained a large staff of hunchbacks to sneeze on his tulips.
Ahhh, quel esprit merveilleux ! - You know, sarcasm.
From the blurb on the book:
In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models - which naturally revolve around him.
[sic]
I can't help but think that Mark Leyner is trying to be a hip, and heterosexual, William Burroughs - a William Burroughs for the New Age. Well, Senator, I knew William Burroughs, and you are no William Burroughs.
The Washington Post Book World praises Leyner as "a provocative social critic." Perhaps they had this passage in mind:
When I arrive at the Jack Lalanne Health Spa, there is no sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing intellectuals and psychics is taking place in its sauna. Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice machines, men with hairy jiggling breasts and gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked belly fat grimly tramping on treadmills and Stairmasters - nothing out of the ordinary.
This really is the level of the "social criticism" in this book, and of most of the hyperbolic humor, as well.
Alright, folks. I never did get my hipster card, so you don't need to demand that I turn it in now.
Rating
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/831...
Like I said, Mark Leyner is a late 20th century Hennie Youngman, at least in this book. Many, many short pieces of straining hipster hyperbole rapidly go by. Here's one, in toto:
Dear Editors at Swank,
Your article on the sensitive areolas of large-breasted women was excellent. Also, thanks for the recipe of paella valenciana that you published in the October Swank. I'm no gourmet chef, but I made the dish for my girlfriend and after dinner she couldn't keep her prosthetic hands off of my veiny nine-inch chorizo.
Yes, I know, irony...
But, sometimes, there is a somewhat funny bit:
-Do you believe in God?
-Yes, sir.
-Do you believe in an anthropomorphic, vengeful, capricious God who can look down on one man and give him fabulous riches and look down on another and say "you're history" and give him a cerebral hemorrhage?
-Yes, sir.
But then, moments later, comes something like this:
-My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a nobleman in Spain in the fifteenth century and it was he who first discovered that the atomized saliva of hunchbacks enhances the growth of flowers. He, in fact, retained a large staff of hunchbacks to sneeze on his tulips.
Ahhh, quel esprit merveilleux ! - You know, sarcasm.
From the blurb on the book:
In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models - which naturally revolve around him.
[sic]
I can't help but think that Mark Leyner is trying to be a hip, and heterosexual, William Burroughs - a William Burroughs for the New Age. Well, Senator, I knew William Burroughs, and you are no William Burroughs.
The Washington Post Book World praises Leyner as "a provocative social critic." Perhaps they had this passage in mind:
When I arrive at the Jack Lalanne Health Spa, there is no sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing intellectuals and psychics is taking place in its sauna. Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice machines, men with hairy jiggling breasts and gelatinous rolls of stretch-marked belly fat grimly tramping on treadmills and Stairmasters - nothing out of the ordinary.
This really is the level of the "social criticism" in this book, and of most of the hyperbolic humor, as well.
Alright, folks. I never did get my hipster card, so you don't need to demand that I turn it in now.
Rating
http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/831...
February 14, 2015
This book may cause me to go back and demote all other books I've rated 5 stars to 4. That's how much I liked this book: it redefined LOVE for me.
February 19, 2017
Unreadable. And I do confess to being obviously ill-equipped to read this type of literature. But I respect those who do as well as those who also can find something worthwhile in their being immersed (and not believing) in wasting one's own precious time. As J.P. Klump liked to say, "It takes all kinds to fill the freeway."
October 16, 2007
ug. there was a reason this was half off in the used book section.
February 20, 2017
Woody Allen used to do a stand up bit that goes, "I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that it was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth. That winter Picasso lived on the Rue de Barque and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth." This novel has a similar sort of seize-the-zeitgeist-by-its-ear-and-give-it-a-twist quality, and it's funny in a bizarre way that perhaps says more about the author than the culture he's parodying.
Somewhere I got the idea that this work influenced David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, but between adding it to my "To-Read" shelf and checking a copy out from my state university library I lost track of where that presumption arose. So that became my little sleuthing assignment, to try and give this weird little novel some goddam context. I tracked down what I think is the kerneling of this idea: a Charlie Rose panel featuring Lerner and Wallace "debating" the prompt, "Are we as novelists up against the obsolescence of serious art in general?" Yikes. All the important cultural figures from this era were diving far, far up their own asses and actively trying to be aggressively weird so nobody else could get up theirs.
In the end, I guess what I decided is: fuck the 90s. What a shitty decade. Everything cool I remember about the 90s turned out to be from the 80s, and everything significant I remember turned out to be from the 2000s. The 90s is like some runty, transitional period when everybody was consciously trying to grow up and prove themselves to be edgy, unique, and inimitable. So we got some of this weirdo, bizarro sci-fi bullshit. But it's one thing to talk about the existential narrative thread that underscores contemporary life, and another thing to write a good story. And this one seems so enamored of doing the former that the latter suffers for it. At a certain point, playing with traditional narrative to make a work into a "self-aware" parody of celebrity culture becomes strikingly gimmicky. I laughed at times, to be fair. Thing is, though, it's crude. Blunt and crude and very silly.
But further down this line of reasoning: whatever Leyner wrote is better than anything I myself have written. And if it's a cry for help it would be rude to downrate it.
2.5 stars out of 5.
(Read in 2017, the fifth book in my Alphabetical Reading Challenge)
Somewhere I got the idea that this work influenced David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest, but between adding it to my "To-Read" shelf and checking a copy out from my state university library I lost track of where that presumption arose. So that became my little sleuthing assignment, to try and give this weird little novel some goddam context. I tracked down what I think is the kerneling of this idea: a Charlie Rose panel featuring Lerner and Wallace "debating" the prompt, "Are we as novelists up against the obsolescence of serious art in general?" Yikes. All the important cultural figures from this era were diving far, far up their own asses and actively trying to be aggressively weird so nobody else could get up theirs.
In the end, I guess what I decided is: fuck the 90s. What a shitty decade. Everything cool I remember about the 90s turned out to be from the 80s, and everything significant I remember turned out to be from the 2000s. The 90s is like some runty, transitional period when everybody was consciously trying to grow up and prove themselves to be edgy, unique, and inimitable. So we got some of this weirdo, bizarro sci-fi bullshit. But it's one thing to talk about the existential narrative thread that underscores contemporary life, and another thing to write a good story. And this one seems so enamored of doing the former that the latter suffers for it. At a certain point, playing with traditional narrative to make a work into a "self-aware" parody of celebrity culture becomes strikingly gimmicky. I laughed at times, to be fair. Thing is, though, it's crude. Blunt and crude and very silly.
But further down this line of reasoning: whatever Leyner wrote is better than anything I myself have written. And if it's a cry for help it would be rude to downrate it.
2.5 stars out of 5.
(Read in 2017, the fifth book in my Alphabetical Reading Challenge)
June 4, 2012
I'm not entirely sure whether I enjoyed this. It was the first by Leyner I've read and it wasn't a good introduction to his work, I don't think. Probably the best thing about it is that it's short.
Leyner has created a parodic version of himself and the main orders of the day are megalomania and celebrity. Some of it is very, very random. The writing style goes of on a tangent and it's quite disconcerting.
Even though I knew to expect this from Leyner's writing, I don't think it worked for me. I'm a huge fan of David Foster Wallace's writing and I was expecting something like this, but this book sort of overdid it all for me. It was a bit of a mess, really, there was virtually no plot, and I was left feeling a bit cold. The author has a vivid imagination and I usually commend this and go for something a bit different over the usual drab novels found on bestseller lists. And I will try another of Leyner's books that sounds good to me - Tetherballs. If I don't enjoy that then I'll have to say that Leyner's work isn't for me
January 12, 2015
A great, fresh, funny novel with a gripping voice all its own. I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t heard of Leyner before, because his brand of absolute dry devotion to demented premise resonates really strongly with the comedy canon I identify most strongly with – think Douglas Adams, Monty Python, Firesign Theater, They Might Be Giants; not in content per se, but in finding a new way to be outlandishly silly and running with it in a way that immediately feels familiar and makes you feel a little apart from people for being in on the joke.
I am a little glad I didn’t discover this earlier, because I can absolutely see a younger version of myself being swallowed completely by Leyner’s style, much in the way the Hitchhiker’s Guide series infected everything I wrote in middle school with an ersatz-Adams mediocre wackiness. Like Adams, Leyner makes carefully constructed passages feel effortless, as though finding the funniest word is like a stream of consciousness for him, letting each one drop and immediately moving to the next. His tendency to weave in topical references definitely makes the book feel dated, but at the same time his devotion to it goes far enough to make this feel like a historical artifact: a national zeitgeist (albeit heavily warped) frozen in time.
The ending was a bit of a letdown. At a certain point, it definitely feels like Leyner has run out of steam; to his credit, he jumps to a radically different style that works to disguise this. But I couldn’t help thinking of another obstinately weird 90’s work, Scud The Disposable Assassin. There, author Rob Schrab similarly had a really compelling premise that he kept pushing further and further, and eventually he lost the thread in a really obvious way. Schrab, working in comics, was able to put the series down for a decade and came back refreshed, finding a satisfying conclusion. Leyner is unable to avail himself of that solution here.
I am a little glad I didn’t discover this earlier, because I can absolutely see a younger version of myself being swallowed completely by Leyner’s style, much in the way the Hitchhiker’s Guide series infected everything I wrote in middle school with an ersatz-Adams mediocre wackiness. Like Adams, Leyner makes carefully constructed passages feel effortless, as though finding the funniest word is like a stream of consciousness for him, letting each one drop and immediately moving to the next. His tendency to weave in topical references definitely makes the book feel dated, but at the same time his devotion to it goes far enough to make this feel like a historical artifact: a national zeitgeist (albeit heavily warped) frozen in time.
The ending was a bit of a letdown. At a certain point, it definitely feels like Leyner has run out of steam; to his credit, he jumps to a radically different style that works to disguise this. But I couldn’t help thinking of another obstinately weird 90’s work, Scud The Disposable Assassin. There, author Rob Schrab similarly had a really compelling premise that he kept pushing further and further, and eventually he lost the thread in a really obvious way. Schrab, working in comics, was able to put the series down for a decade and came back refreshed, finding a satisfying conclusion. Leyner is unable to avail himself of that solution here.
July 2, 2012
just as much fun as My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist-- in fact, maybe even more so-- but as a novel, it actually has a structure and therefore (after a while) gets somewhat, um, OKAY SO "PREDICTABLE" IS DEFINITELY NOT THE WORD... i guess it just has more of a one-note feel. but still, whatever, the guy is brilliant. though i fear he might be driving me insane.
Like ballistic war-cannoli that fly through the sky and plunge into people's mouths at incredible speeds, rigid microscopic larval creatures hurtle through time.
Like ballistic war-cannoli that fly through the sky and plunge into people's mouths at incredible speeds, rigid microscopic larval creatures hurtle through time.
Read
May 20, 2017Here's your hyperbolic fun. Easier to read, more traditionally narrative, than his previous two. The televisual equivalent is Metalocalypse. Seriously.
Also important for the Leyner fan is his not-to-be-missed movie War Inc.
Also important for the Leyner fan is his not-to-be-missed movie War Inc.
June 18, 2023
Με κούρασε. Ειναι η υποτιθέμενη αυτοβιογραφία του ίδιου του δημιουργού. Το είχα χρόνια στα αδιάβαστα, αγορασμένο από στοκατζίδικο, όταν είχαν κλείσει οι εκδόσεις Aquarius. Με είχε τραβήξει το θετικό σχόλιο του Ρόμπινς στο οπισθόφυλλο, αλλά τελικά δεν... Μου φάνηκε επιτηδευμενα σουρεαλιστικό, σαν να προσπαθούσε να μιμηθεί π.χ. τον Ρόμπινς, όμως του έλειπε η σπιρτάδα και το χιούμορ, στοιχεία που βγάζουν αυθόρμητο γέλιο. Φυσικά, υπάρχουν και ορισμένες καλες στιγμές, όπως αυτή με τον ιατρικό τυρογλύπτη, αλλά έως εκεί.
April 27, 2012
I've heard it said that this was Leyner's best, but Tetherballs is still my favorite so far. I really wish that I could rate this a 5 on language, leaps, and reflection of the modern phenomenon of popular culture and then separately rate it four on my overall impression. It really has some impressive and enjoyable aspects, but I felt I had to rate it a little lower just because I didn't grok it as much as Tetherballs and Nutsack. Still, it is marvelous writing and Leyner truly moshes to the rhythm section of his own heavy metal theremin section. I just liked other Leyner works better.
November 14, 2010
A furious and hilarious read/rant by Team Leyner (aka Mark). There is absolutely nothing like it and the comparison to Burroughs is largely because Markie Leyner is such a master of satire and seems to move in and out of language with an ease and mastery that only people like Burroughs do - weaving stories and scenarios that are so unbridled and concise as to leave you a different person.
February 26, 2025
When you blend excesses of American ideology with sentences like: “The problem is that when you reach a level of achievement that few people have ever reached, when you routinely do things that no one else is even capable of imagining never mind attempting, when you are destined for greatness and possess the real fortitude and inner focus to fulfill that destiny…you have no real friends, no real family. People look at you with awe, with fear, with lust, with suspicion, with envy…but not with affection. This is just a fact of life for me. It’s just the way it is.”
Along with a relentless blend of high and low art such as: “The Hyatt Self Surgery Clinic? Self surgery clinics were the medical equivalent of U-Hauls or rental rug shampooers. Clinics provided a private operating room, instruments, monitoring devices,drugs, and instructional video assets for any procedure that could be performed solo, under local anesthetic, on any part of your anatomy that you could reach easily with both hands. As I pulled into the parking lot of the recently renovated Hyatt, I realized I’d left my copy of Edmund Spencers ‘The Faerie Queen’ in the Mercury Capri XR2 that I’d test driven for Gentleman’s Quarterly. All my notes on the 132-hp turbocharged roadster were scrawled in the margins of the Elizabethan poet’s magnum opus.” Or as Leyner explains when he actually gets into the Hyatt: “I hesitated for a moment before responding. It seemed injudicious to divulge to this woman that a deceased rodent was impacted between my prostrate gland and urethra and that the surgical procedure I intended to perform was a radical gerbilectomy.”
Then I will love the book shamelessly. Et Tu Babe is dumbfoundingly hilarious and vibrant with its genius associations. While the first half was much stronger in my opinion (I personally was tired by the shameless meta-promotion that constituted most of the ending which became a bit too repetitive of a joke compared with the hilarity and character building up until chapter 5) I was never tired of Leyner’s imagination. As far as candidates for “meta fiction” go this is as good as it gets. But the book is much much more than that. To me, Et Tu Babe reads like a landmark in the development of the ‘bizarro’ genre. Honestly one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. For fans of William Burroughs, Chuck Tingle, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.
Along with a relentless blend of high and low art such as: “The Hyatt Self Surgery Clinic? Self surgery clinics were the medical equivalent of U-Hauls or rental rug shampooers. Clinics provided a private operating room, instruments, monitoring devices,drugs, and instructional video assets for any procedure that could be performed solo, under local anesthetic, on any part of your anatomy that you could reach easily with both hands. As I pulled into the parking lot of the recently renovated Hyatt, I realized I’d left my copy of Edmund Spencers ‘The Faerie Queen’ in the Mercury Capri XR2 that I’d test driven for Gentleman’s Quarterly. All my notes on the 132-hp turbocharged roadster were scrawled in the margins of the Elizabethan poet’s magnum opus.” Or as Leyner explains when he actually gets into the Hyatt: “I hesitated for a moment before responding. It seemed injudicious to divulge to this woman that a deceased rodent was impacted between my prostrate gland and urethra and that the surgical procedure I intended to perform was a radical gerbilectomy.”
Then I will love the book shamelessly. Et Tu Babe is dumbfoundingly hilarious and vibrant with its genius associations. While the first half was much stronger in my opinion (I personally was tired by the shameless meta-promotion that constituted most of the ending which became a bit too repetitive of a joke compared with the hilarity and character building up until chapter 5) I was never tired of Leyner’s imagination. As far as candidates for “meta fiction” go this is as good as it gets. But the book is much much more than that. To me, Et Tu Babe reads like a landmark in the development of the ‘bizarro’ genre. Honestly one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. For fans of William Burroughs, Chuck Tingle, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace.
July 20, 2020
If you've ever dreamed what it would be like to be get a lobotomy...
If you've ever asked yourself, "Hmmm, how would I feel after putting on Elon Musk's 'wizard hat'?"
If you've ever wondered what humor might sound like in 500 years...
If you've ever longed to dance at a transhumanist rave....
If you've ever wondered, "What does gum on the bottom of a shoe taste like after 5 months?"...
If you've ever sought out sentences that seek to recreate the feeling of knocking back a tall glass of orange juice after brushing your pearly whites...
If you enjoy narrators with larger-than-life personalities...
If you've ever thought that the world is crazy but that its fictional representation doesn't do justice to its craziness...
I invite you to partake in Mark Leyner's radioactive beverage, Et Tu, Babe.
If you've ever asked yourself, "Hmmm, how would I feel after putting on Elon Musk's 'wizard hat'?"
If you've ever wondered what humor might sound like in 500 years...
If you've ever longed to dance at a transhumanist rave....
If you've ever wondered, "What does gum on the bottom of a shoe taste like after 5 months?"...
If you've ever sought out sentences that seek to recreate the feeling of knocking back a tall glass of orange juice after brushing your pearly whites...
If you enjoy narrators with larger-than-life personalities...
If you've ever thought that the world is crazy but that its fictional representation doesn't do justice to its craziness...
I invite you to partake in Mark Leyner's radioactive beverage, Et Tu, Babe.
June 9, 2020
Not quite as funny as when I first read it, but still an excellent book.
February 26, 2022
i’m debating whether to give this 4 or 5 stars. it was incredible!! mark leyner is a fantastic author
Read
January 14, 2025cinema. a genuine schizogram.
November 7, 2024
Extremely weird and extremely brilliant, you will either love this book or hate it. A sort of mad-lib-esque style of writing featuring lots of medical terms, sex and celebrity mentions might not sound like your thing, but this is truly unlike any other book I've read. Laugh-out-loud funny and also a bizarre self-referential and self-worshipping faux-biography, this is just as weird as the title makes you think it is. Scratched my brain in the perfect way and will leave me with mental images that will last a lifetime.
June 5, 2025
“My whole life has been one long ultraviolent hyperkinetic nightmare. But yes, I am an author. (And a dog trainer — Marty, I taught my puppy Carmella to drink scalding hot black coffee out of her bowl on the floor!) The other day, I imagined that it was the year 2187 — a dozen people were gathered at the grave site of porn star John Holmes to commemorate the 200th anniversary of his death. Well, Marty, I want to be remembered by more people than that. I don't know.. perhaps that's why I write.
The unwashed armpits of the most beautiful women in the world ... a urinal with chunks of fresh watermelon in it . . . a retarded guy whining "Eddie, Eddie, get me an Ovaltine" — almost anything inspires me.”
—
“I bid the guy adieu and walked down the street, trying to figure out what he meant—‘bakin' doughnuts’? Maybe it meant he was doing nothing cooking up a big zero every day. Maybe he was doing a lot of crack—blowing smoke rings through his mind. Or maybe he was pimping-maybe ‘doughnuts’ stood for vaginas and ‘bake’ meant control, exploit— taking the raw dough of young girls and parlaying it into lucrative pastry. Or maybe Rocco had hit it big maybe ‘doughnuts’ stood for the fat round digits in a seven-figure income. Then I thought maybe it meant that he was wasting his life away masturbating ... maybe ‘doughnut’ stood for the round configuration of fingers and thumb around the penis and ‘bakin'’ was a literal reference to the heat caused by the friction of hand against dick or a figurative reference to the passion of autoeroticism.”
—
“The teenage baby-sitters are slathering me with Ben-Gay. I'm eleven. I've got this erotic fascination with the girls' armpits — it's completely unfocused; I don't know quite what I want to 'do to or with their armpits, but I'm locked into their brunette stubble. The two girls shut my bedroom door, lock it, and turn out the lights. They take the warm pink wads of bubblegum from their mouths and affix them to special acupressure points on my body. They remove their tampons and smear menstrual blood on my eyelids. They shave their armpits and rinse their razors in a basin and we drink the hairy water and we chant — their Marlboros glowing in the crepuscular shadows. Then one of them — I think it was Felice — puts my face into her freshly shaven armpit, which smells slightly but deliciously of teenybopper b.o., and she says 'count backwards from 100' and the next thing I remember is waking up and it's Rosh Hashanah, U.S.A., in the 1990s."
—
“My insignia is a guy surfing on an enormous wave of lava — it's an avalanche of this lurid molten spume with this glowering chiseled commando in baggy polka-dotted trunks on an iridescent board careering across the precipice of this incredible fuming tsunami of lava — and there's an erupting volcano in the distance in the upper right-hand corner. It's excellent.
I have it tattooed on my heart. And I don't mean on the skin of my chest over my heart. I mean tattooed on the organ itself.
It's illegal in the States — I had to go to Mexico. It's called visceral tattooing. They have to open you up. They use an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that the tattoo shows up on X-rays and CAT scans.”
—
“Lorphelin was referring to an article I'd written deploring the fecklessness, physical cowardice, and political disloyalty of the current literary community. Published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the article exhorted artists to stop their incessant whining; to stop crawling on their knees with their hands out, begging for grant money and fellowships; to stop exalting self-marginalization; to emerge from their academic. sanctuaries where they huddle like shivering, squinting, runty, sexless, nihilistic mice — to emerge into the intoxicating, palpi-tating, nutrient-rich sunlight of the marketplace, to intermix with the great people of a great nation, and to be emboldened by the truculent spirit of the populace.”
—
“Sex was intense. Creamy lime cum. Then creamy apricot cum. Then a mint gel. And finally a cyan-yellow-magenta swirl that actually burst into flame. Now, I'm no stranger to chemically enhanced lovemaking. For instance, l've explored the romantic possibilities of the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (OT), used in conjunction with Piracetam, a drug which increases endurance and enhances concentration. I've been known to revive a humdrum evening with a discreet injection of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO), which raises the red blood-cell count so that more oxygen is carried through the circulatory system, for big performance gains. And every so often, I like to turn the lights down low, put something lush and dreamy on the stereo, and inject myself with blood plasma from hibernating woodchucks, which imparts to the lovemaking an extraordinarily serene and sylvan quality. But these paled in comparison to Lincoln's morning breath.”
—
“Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestlé's Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and G-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words Be All That You Can Be? Try watching that on Lincoln's morning breath. It's un-fucking-believable.”
—
“'Do you wear peasant blouses and billowy gypsy skirts? I'm a drooling, catheterized, cataract-eyed white supremacist from Baton Rouge who has three to four lucid hours a day. Let's go underground where Zionist water-fluoridators and Russian space debris can't find us.' What do you want to bet that this guy gets a couple of hundred responses?"
—
“Each item of clothing — leather blazer, T-shirt, snakeskin boots, jeans, socks, and finally underpants — is removed as if I were stripping for an audience at a maximum security prison for criminally insane women. With that masturbatory simultaneity of languor and urgency, I whip the floor with my silk bikini briefs that have been stretched grotesquely out of shape after a day of restraining my restless genitals, and I hear — in my head — the horrific cacophony of gasps, moans, ululations, stomping feet, shrieks, sobs, pleas”
—
"Some people are preoccupied with the symbolism of their dreams and with who they might have been in past incarnations and with where their souls are going after they die, but I never think about any of that shit. I just love this earth. I love the morning. When the first morning light hits my eye, I feel like a new appliance that's been unpacked and plugged in for the first time. But my life is beautiful. Perhaps that's why I love the morning light. I have money. I have a voluptuous wife. And I have fans. People who have ugly lives often hate the morning; it means the beginning of all the pain and the toil and the flashbacks all over again, and they try to bear the unbearable until twilight, which comes on slowly with the physical sensation of a warm barbiturate liquid, and of course the black silent night — phone off the hook, doors bolted — is the full-blown anodyne.
That's the circadian saga of the ugly life, in brief. When I awaken, I go outside naked. The sun — the perpetual hydrogen bomb — is my shower, and it galvanizes me, it freaks me out. A pirouetting monster emitting guttural expressions of ecstasy in the radiance of the sun”
—
“It's almost impossible to conceive that this is the body of an acclaimed writer. And not just an acclaimed writer, but perhaps the most influential writer at work today, certainly the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people focking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good. Between mouthfuls of fennel-flavored monkfish, he chats amiably with a group of admirers who've surrounded him.”
—
“Is this somehow related to heavy-metal? Yes, probably. Did Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, Austen, et al psych themselves up to face the empty page by staring at their bare torsos in the mirror or by sinking even deeper into the narcissistic contemplation of an even smaller frame of that image, e.g., the silver skull nestled in the hairy cleavage of a pumped chest? The answer must be no. But then I don't think that those folks wrote to enhance their fuckability.”
—
“My books and my body — my status as a reckless writer and a gorgeous man — are my iridescent plumage; they're the equivalent of the male L. ocellatus frog's 250- to 500-hertz call made to maintain territoriality and to attract mates; they're the equivalent of the peculiar ritual of the male pyrochroidae beetle displaying to a potential mate a deep cleft in his forehead. Stashed within the cleft is a small dose of the chemical cantharidin; during courtship, the male exposes his cleft to the female, she grabs his head and immediately laps up the chemical offering. Apparently placated, she allows the male to mate. Scientists have determined that the male transfers to the female a much larger quantity of cantharidin during intercourse, and that she subsequently incorporates the chemical into her eggs, which thenceforth are protected against ants and other common predators of beetle eggs.
My books and my body: my not-so-subliminal advertisement to women that I will make a primo contribution to the genetic makeup and survivability of their children.
It's the night. I spread my cerebral hemispheres and display my chemical offering. Who will grab my head and immediately lap it up?”
The unwashed armpits of the most beautiful women in the world ... a urinal with chunks of fresh watermelon in it . . . a retarded guy whining "Eddie, Eddie, get me an Ovaltine" — almost anything inspires me.”
—
“I bid the guy adieu and walked down the street, trying to figure out what he meant—‘bakin' doughnuts’? Maybe it meant he was doing nothing cooking up a big zero every day. Maybe he was doing a lot of crack—blowing smoke rings through his mind. Or maybe he was pimping-maybe ‘doughnuts’ stood for vaginas and ‘bake’ meant control, exploit— taking the raw dough of young girls and parlaying it into lucrative pastry. Or maybe Rocco had hit it big maybe ‘doughnuts’ stood for the fat round digits in a seven-figure income. Then I thought maybe it meant that he was wasting his life away masturbating ... maybe ‘doughnut’ stood for the round configuration of fingers and thumb around the penis and ‘bakin'’ was a literal reference to the heat caused by the friction of hand against dick or a figurative reference to the passion of autoeroticism.”
—
“The teenage baby-sitters are slathering me with Ben-Gay. I'm eleven. I've got this erotic fascination with the girls' armpits — it's completely unfocused; I don't know quite what I want to 'do to or with their armpits, but I'm locked into their brunette stubble. The two girls shut my bedroom door, lock it, and turn out the lights. They take the warm pink wads of bubblegum from their mouths and affix them to special acupressure points on my body. They remove their tampons and smear menstrual blood on my eyelids. They shave their armpits and rinse their razors in a basin and we drink the hairy water and we chant — their Marlboros glowing in the crepuscular shadows. Then one of them — I think it was Felice — puts my face into her freshly shaven armpit, which smells slightly but deliciously of teenybopper b.o., and she says 'count backwards from 100' and the next thing I remember is waking up and it's Rosh Hashanah, U.S.A., in the 1990s."
—
“My insignia is a guy surfing on an enormous wave of lava — it's an avalanche of this lurid molten spume with this glowering chiseled commando in baggy polka-dotted trunks on an iridescent board careering across the precipice of this incredible fuming tsunami of lava — and there's an erupting volcano in the distance in the upper right-hand corner. It's excellent.
I have it tattooed on my heart. And I don't mean on the skin of my chest over my heart. I mean tattooed on the organ itself.
It's illegal in the States — I had to go to Mexico. It's called visceral tattooing. They have to open you up. They use an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that the tattoo shows up on X-rays and CAT scans.”
—
“Lorphelin was referring to an article I'd written deploring the fecklessness, physical cowardice, and political disloyalty of the current literary community. Published on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, the article exhorted artists to stop their incessant whining; to stop crawling on their knees with their hands out, begging for grant money and fellowships; to stop exalting self-marginalization; to emerge from their academic. sanctuaries where they huddle like shivering, squinting, runty, sexless, nihilistic mice — to emerge into the intoxicating, palpi-tating, nutrient-rich sunlight of the marketplace, to intermix with the great people of a great nation, and to be emboldened by the truculent spirit of the populace.”
—
“Sex was intense. Creamy lime cum. Then creamy apricot cum. Then a mint gel. And finally a cyan-yellow-magenta swirl that actually burst into flame. Now, I'm no stranger to chemically enhanced lovemaking. For instance, l've explored the romantic possibilities of the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (OT), used in conjunction with Piracetam, a drug which increases endurance and enhances concentration. I've been known to revive a humdrum evening with a discreet injection of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO), which raises the red blood-cell count so that more oxygen is carried through the circulatory system, for big performance gains. And every so often, I like to turn the lights down low, put something lush and dreamy on the stereo, and inject myself with blood plasma from hibernating woodchucks, which imparts to the lovemaking an extraordinarily serene and sylvan quality. But these paled in comparison to Lincoln's morning breath.”
—
“Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestlé's Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and G-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words Be All That You Can Be? Try watching that on Lincoln's morning breath. It's un-fucking-believable.”
—
“'Do you wear peasant blouses and billowy gypsy skirts? I'm a drooling, catheterized, cataract-eyed white supremacist from Baton Rouge who has three to four lucid hours a day. Let's go underground where Zionist water-fluoridators and Russian space debris can't find us.' What do you want to bet that this guy gets a couple of hundred responses?"
—
“Each item of clothing — leather blazer, T-shirt, snakeskin boots, jeans, socks, and finally underpants — is removed as if I were stripping for an audience at a maximum security prison for criminally insane women. With that masturbatory simultaneity of languor and urgency, I whip the floor with my silk bikini briefs that have been stretched grotesquely out of shape after a day of restraining my restless genitals, and I hear — in my head — the horrific cacophony of gasps, moans, ululations, stomping feet, shrieks, sobs, pleas”
—
"Some people are preoccupied with the symbolism of their dreams and with who they might have been in past incarnations and with where their souls are going after they die, but I never think about any of that shit. I just love this earth. I love the morning. When the first morning light hits my eye, I feel like a new appliance that's been unpacked and plugged in for the first time. But my life is beautiful. Perhaps that's why I love the morning light. I have money. I have a voluptuous wife. And I have fans. People who have ugly lives often hate the morning; it means the beginning of all the pain and the toil and the flashbacks all over again, and they try to bear the unbearable until twilight, which comes on slowly with the physical sensation of a warm barbiturate liquid, and of course the black silent night — phone off the hook, doors bolted — is the full-blown anodyne.
That's the circadian saga of the ugly life, in brief. When I awaken, I go outside naked. The sun — the perpetual hydrogen bomb — is my shower, and it galvanizes me, it freaks me out. A pirouetting monster emitting guttural expressions of ecstasy in the radiance of the sun”
—
“It's almost impossible to conceive that this is the body of an acclaimed writer. And not just an acclaimed writer, but perhaps the most influential writer at work today, certainly the writer who single-handedly brought a generation of young people focking back to the bookstores after they had purportedly abandoned literature for good. Between mouthfuls of fennel-flavored monkfish, he chats amiably with a group of admirers who've surrounded him.”
—
“Is this somehow related to heavy-metal? Yes, probably. Did Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, Austen, et al psych themselves up to face the empty page by staring at their bare torsos in the mirror or by sinking even deeper into the narcissistic contemplation of an even smaller frame of that image, e.g., the silver skull nestled in the hairy cleavage of a pumped chest? The answer must be no. But then I don't think that those folks wrote to enhance their fuckability.”
—
“My books and my body — my status as a reckless writer and a gorgeous man — are my iridescent plumage; they're the equivalent of the male L. ocellatus frog's 250- to 500-hertz call made to maintain territoriality and to attract mates; they're the equivalent of the peculiar ritual of the male pyrochroidae beetle displaying to a potential mate a deep cleft in his forehead. Stashed within the cleft is a small dose of the chemical cantharidin; during courtship, the male exposes his cleft to the female, she grabs his head and immediately laps up the chemical offering. Apparently placated, she allows the male to mate. Scientists have determined that the male transfers to the female a much larger quantity of cantharidin during intercourse, and that she subsequently incorporates the chemical into her eggs, which thenceforth are protected against ants and other common predators of beetle eggs.
My books and my body: my not-so-subliminal advertisement to women that I will make a primo contribution to the genetic makeup and survivability of their children.
It's the night. I spread my cerebral hemispheres and display my chemical offering. Who will grab my head and immediately lap it up?”
February 16, 2025
mark leyner you are a hidden gem
Read
April 29, 2014A strange book, which makes you think: OK so who is this Mark guy sleeping with at Vintage? How did he get this published? What convinced them? And all of these thoughts came to me while reading the first ten pages... Then you slowly get the hang of it... It still works as a list of semi-developed ideas for a cheap almost Mike Hammer style soap opera, but at least you realise that all these fantasy notes revolve around the main character named... wait... yes, you guessed it - Mark Leyner... Some of the notes are fun and that is what keeps you going. And it does in the end have some sort of a feeling of continuity is iits chaos if nothing else... I suppose it is good that not all books are similar after all... And at the end of the year, when I will try to think of the top 10 books I read this year, it will probably creep in there, because it will have stayed in my head for its unusuallness...
And whoever Mark was sleeping with at the time the book was published... Do you still work there? I have a few notes that could be published.. :)
And whoever Mark was sleeping with at the time the book was published... Do you still work there? I have a few notes that could be published.. :)
March 31, 2008
Mark Leyner has a style like no other. I have seen his work labeled by others as both postmodern and cyberpunk. I'm not sure if either of these really apply, but almost all of his work makes me giddy when I read it. This book is essentially a (supposed) look into his life as a famous writer. Basically combine every story of excess that you have ever heard about William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, and Dylan Thomas and you have a general sense of a day at the office for Mark Leyner (the character). We also get a look at Team Leyner, the shadowy, mafia types on his staff that attend to whatever cover-ups and assassinations that a successful writer might need. This book is full of humor, and I love how he has cast himself as a bigger than life character. Although I am happy for Leyner's success in the non-fiction world, I wish he would come back to fiction.
July 30, 2012
A Mark Leyner sentence is a beautiful thing. It starts out like your average sentence but somewhere in the middle takes a plunge into complete lunacy. This book is filled with many, many such sentences, which when piled on top of each other comprise a very funny book.
A lazy comparison would be David Foster Wallace at his most absurd, but that would do no justice to the madness contained here. Leyner doesn't really care about exploring his characters' emotions, nor stirring yours, so the humor might wear a little thin after a while. But there's enough narrative tissue and structural ingenuity that keep it from devolving into joke book material.
A lazy comparison would be David Foster Wallace at his most absurd, but that would do no justice to the madness contained here. Leyner doesn't really care about exploring his characters' emotions, nor stirring yours, so the humor might wear a little thin after a while. But there's enough narrative tissue and structural ingenuity that keep it from devolving into joke book material.
July 11, 2019
Like Harold Jaffe's Straight Razor and Don DeLillo's White Noise, this put me ahead of the game. Mark's disappearing writers in his programs who might be a threat to him — workshops are nice, but you can't be too careful, right, it's a crowded market out there with only "so many bookshelves" with space for authors — which he learned (I think) from the guy who's head of his security ("Team Leyner"), formerly working for dictators south of the border and helping with their shenanigans and, more recently, as a New Jersey gym teacher.
What else?
(To get the jokes, you gotta be willing to keep up. "Leyner or be square!" I say. And still do!)
What else?
(To get the jokes, you gotta be willing to keep up. "Leyner or be square!" I say. And still do!)
December 5, 2008
Is Mark Leyner a genius or an egotist? In Et Tu, Babe, some might say he is making blood sacrifices at the Hunter S. Thompson Shrine of Self-Involvement.
The Mark Leyner of Et Tu, Babe would then simply clock them in the chops with a pool cue and satirize them into submission.
Leyner manages to capture the fever dreams of Burroughs, the sci-fi sarcasm of Vonnegut, and yes, the megalomania of Thompson in one novel. It all works startlingly well. Enter with gusto and submit to the exquisiteness of this shockingly funny book, babe.
The Mark Leyner of Et Tu, Babe would then simply clock them in the chops with a pool cue and satirize them into submission.
Leyner manages to capture the fever dreams of Burroughs, the sci-fi sarcasm of Vonnegut, and yes, the megalomania of Thompson in one novel. It all works startlingly well. Enter with gusto and submit to the exquisiteness of this shockingly funny book, babe.
December 31, 2008
Mark Leyner seems to be torn between trying to be William S. Burroughs and Buckaroo Banzai. Using his alter ego as protagonist for his books is amusing, but does make the reader wonder if he's an egotistical bastard, or merely self-satirizing. I'm sure there are fans out there who will argue that he's poking fun at the fleeting nature of celebrity, and the ridiculous lengths to which fans will go for their heroes. They might be correct, but that still doesn't diminish the impression that he's just using that as justification for writing some really weird books.
February 15, 2009
I'm not quite sure what to think of this book.
On the one hand, it was an amusing read, pure and simple. On the other hand, it was completely lacking in plot or anything that a story "should" have. I'm not sure that this book is supposed to function like a normal story, however, which is what makes it difficult to judge. It's obviously a parody...a parody of memoir, a parody of celebrity, and parody of pop culture, and it is for these reasons that it's amusing. As a story though, it quite frankly sucked.
On the one hand, it was an amusing read, pure and simple. On the other hand, it was completely lacking in plot or anything that a story "should" have. I'm not sure that this book is supposed to function like a normal story, however, which is what makes it difficult to judge. It's obviously a parody...a parody of memoir, a parody of celebrity, and parody of pop culture, and it is for these reasons that it's amusing. As a story though, it quite frankly sucked.
June 16, 2009
Leyner has an extensive and wide open imagination.
Anybody can go out and get a tattoo on their body, but it takes a real man, like Mark Leyner, to have his sternum cut open and have his left ventricle inked with radioactive goo visible only on x-rays.
From killer nonagenarian bodyguards to the morning breath of Abraham Lincoln to cult leader, Mark Leyner makes this bizarro story about the worlds most influential author, Mark Leyner, leap from the page.
Anybody can go out and get a tattoo on their body, but it takes a real man, like Mark Leyner, to have his sternum cut open and have his left ventricle inked with radioactive goo visible only on x-rays.
From killer nonagenarian bodyguards to the morning breath of Abraham Lincoln to cult leader, Mark Leyner makes this bizarro story about the worlds most influential author, Mark Leyner, leap from the page.
June 21, 2008
this guy was hilarious for like five years in the mid-90s, and now for some reason, he is guest writing the fashion dos and don'ts in us weekly ("mariah carey... more like mariah scarey!!!") or some bullshit like that. it makes me sad. don't ever buy the audiobook version of this because they take out all of the swearing and the dirty parts, so it's like 15 minutes long.
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