The blazingly inventive, fictional autobiography of Mark Leyner, one of America’s “rare, true original voices.” (Gary Shteyngart)
Dizzyingly brilliant and raucously funny, Gone with the Mind is the story of Mark Leyner’s life, told as only Mark Leyner can.
In this utterly unconventional, autobiographical novel, Mark Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a mall. Besides Mark’s mother, who’s driven him to the mall and introduces him before he begins, and a few employees of fast food chain Panda Express who ask a handful of questions, the reading is completely without audience. The action of Gone with the Mind takes place exclusively at the food court, but the territory covered on these pages has no bounds.
Existential, self-aware, and very much concerned with the relationship between a complicated mother and an even more complicated son, Leyner’s story—with its bold, experimental structure—is a moving work of genius.
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Dazzling, hilarious, heartfelt and entirely-mind-blowingly-original, Mark Leyner's fictional memoir, Gone With The Mind, confirms the author's status as one of the most singular, wild-ass and brilliantly fearless voices in American literature. In prose that is equal parts Roth, Joyce, Scientific American and the Marx Brothers, Gone With The Mind delineates the deep soul and life story of man staring down the barrel of mortality-in the food court of a New Jersey mall. There isn't a convention Mark Leyner does not shatter, nor an aspect of 21st century culture-from robot rape to first person shooter games-he does not reexamine and render fresh. Quite possibly the first literary work of genius-comic and otherwise-of the new millennium.
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Jerry Stahl