by Mark Leyner
—Lev Grossman, Time
“Long before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert grabbed the cudgel of irony to blast through our decaying national discourse, Leyner’s electrifying, exuberant fiction burst through all narrative conventions, alive to every moment, and seemed to promise a new way forward, savaging celebrity culture while reveling in the hallucinogenic clutter.…Leyner riffs like Ornette Coleman: intense, rhythmic, theatrical. His sentences are twisty and windy, packed with puns and consumer products and pop culture and self-consciousness, and any attempt to replicate the Pop-Tart and Katy Perry chorus sugar-rush fizz of his prose will only get the self-conscious part right.”
—Don Oldenburg, USA Today
“Mark Leyner sends the novel form through the stratosphere with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack.”
—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
“Strange and hilarious.”
—Matthew Perpetua, Rolling Stone
“A total delight. Like tweaking out on a super-trippy crystal meth high, but without the crash of annihilating depression that normally follows. Not that I really know this for sure since I’ve never actually been high.”
—Todd Solondz, director of Welcome to the Dollhouse,
Happiness, Storytelling, and Palindromes
“To read Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is to have it etched on your brain with a sharp periodontal tool.”
—William Gibson
“Like all great books (the Bible, The Boy Scout Handbook, The Joy of Cooking) The Sugar Frosted Nutsack thrums with a sense of inevitability, as if it has existed since the beginning of time. And it has. Read it out loud to your children, to your lovers, to strangers on street corners, and watch them be transformed.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in
Suck City and The Ticking Is the Bomb
“A wild, psychedelic digression of a novel that brings chaos to order in such a way that the story turns into pure mind. Reading it is like roller-skating backward up a disintegrating spiral staircase composed of millions of fluttering small moths. Except that it’s also like a thousand other things, none of which—I guarantee it—you’ve ever known or experienced before.”
—Walter Kirn
“A strange and indescribable novel.…Intermittently miraculous and often hilarious. It is also, unlike Leyner’s previous novels, at times almost achingly sad.…I felt as if I had stumbled on something thrilling and illicit—a piece of literary samizdat.…His writing is funny—unabashedly, repeatedly, relentlessly. To this day, you can bring me ten contemporary novels with HILARIOUS! stamped all over their covers and I will show you ten pages of Leyner that are funnier than all of them combined.”
—Adam Sternbergh, New York Times Magazine
“Leyner runs the reader down a ruthless treadmill. He is administering an endurance test of an endorphin overdose.”
—Troy Patterson, Slate
“The Sugar Frosted Nutsack shows that his writing hasn’t lost any of its irreverent, hallucinatory freshness.”
—Laurence Lowe, Details
“The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is fantastic. It’s volcanic and sexy and utterly unlike anything I’ve read before. It feels like the future in a dazzling way that has nothing to do with looking backward. It’s been a long wait for a new novel from Mark Leyner, but worth it. Ten out of ten from me.”
—Douglas Coupland
“Every sentence reads like a DMT-induced hallucination, adding up to an anarchic masterpiece of vulgarity, total pandemonium, and cartoonish free association; it may indeed be the craziest book ever written and adventurous readers in search of a seriously batty, one-of-a-kind work of unhinged imagination need look no further. Leyner and Ike Karton are heroes befitting our overloaded age, blurry yesterdays, and fungible times ahead.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, Leyner not only makes his meta reasonable, he finally makes it feel fundamental. In an age of steroidal Internet, of reality TV that’s endlessly deriving itself—the question isn’t Snooki and JWoww’s new show, it’s the show after that—Leyner has his best material. He’s been waiting for this all along.…The effect is hypnotic yet dazzling: a closed circuit with endless textual trap doors.”
—Theo Schell-Lambert, San Francisco Chronicle
“Mark Leyner is either a genius or a freak, and it may not matter which, because his books are compulsively readable, created by a literary mind that seems to have no precedent.…Leyner wants to capture your gaze, or die trying.…If anything, the novel has been slapped awake, reanimated as something lighter and stronger, in terms of sheer entertainment, forfeiting not one drop of originality and ambition. In Leyner’s hands, the novel is an underwear-soaking comedy device more refined, and chemically stronger, than pretty much any other method designed to send people to their knees, weeping with laughter.…Think of it as Pale Fire written by medically enhanced teenagers who’ve overdosed on smart drugs (while also mastering an arsenal of literary techniques).…Leyner writes with one eye on the critical wolves, tossing out proof of his considerable erudition and formal prowess and occasionally rendering a truly tender moment just to show you he knows how to do it. He demonstrates how much is still possible for the novel when tradition is left behind, proving that fiction can be robust, provocative and staggeringly inventive, without for a moment forfeiting entertainment.”
—Ben Marcus, New York Times Book Review
“His latest novel, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, sticks out like an infected, throbbing appendage compared with the seemingly endless crop of mopey, self-important, “serious” novels crowding the shelves of bookstores these days.…The epic is even stranger than it sounds, and we belly laughed throughout the weekend it took to devour it.”
—Vice
“This stream-of-consciousness–laden gospel gradually reveals that the book itself is the eternal story of Ike Karton, a forty-eight-year-old anti-Semitic everyman from New Jersey.…There’s nothing quite like Leyner on a roll. Anyone who’s still with us by now should embrace this earnest exploitation of the myths of the new world, complete with celebrity cameos.”
—Kirkus Reviews
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Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Introduction
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Reading Group Guide
A conversation between novelists Rick Moody and Mark Leyner
Questions and topics for discussion
About the Author
Also by Mark Leyner
Acclaim for Mark Leyner’s The Sugar Frosted Nutsack
Newsletters
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Leyner
Reading group guide copyright © 2013 by Mark Leyner and Little, Brown and Company
Cover design by Kapo Ng. Cover art: Anette Linnea Rasmussen/ShutterStock
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First e-book edition: March 2012
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Ike’s “10 Things That I Know for Sure About Women” list was originally published as “What I Know for Sure About Women” in O, the Oprah Magazine.
Section beginning here was inspired by Theatre in Southeast Asia by James R. Brandon (Harvard University Press, 1967).
ISBN: 978-0-316-19277-4
