Describe your ideal reading experience.
It’s very early in the morning, preferably before sunrise, before I can get mangled in the farm machinery of the day. My preference is always poetry or some intensely belletristic prose. I’ve also been known to bring books to the gym, which is in egregiously bad taste, and which you do at your own peril. If you’re reading Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Representation” between sets, someone’s going to drop a dumbbell on your head. You’re asking for it.
What’s the last great book you read?
“Little Dorrit.” Not only did I think it was great, but I discovered a whole substratum of “Dark Dickens” in there, a whole phantasmagoria like something out of Lautréamont or Burroughs.
What books are on your night stand?
Including on my Kindles: Iris Murdoch’s “The Sea, the Sea”; the Upanishads; “Gérard de Nerval: Selected Writings”; “Super-Cannes,” by J.G. Ballard; “Pakistan’s ISI: A Concise History of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate,” by Julian Richards; “The Vory: Russia’s Super Mafia,” by Mark Galeotti.
Do you count any books as guilty pleasures?
You’re talking to someone who genuinely enjoys watching “The Golden Bachelorette,” “Naked and Afraid,” street fights on YouTube, random clips on PornHub, etc., so I’m not sure “guilty pleasures” is a thing for me. I do like reading material that I don’t understand in the least, that’s complete gibberish to me — articles about theoretical physics, about string theory, quantum gravity, amplituhedrons. Maybe that qualifies.
What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?
I recommended Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” to my wife, Mercedes; Janet Malcolm’s book about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, “Two Lives,” to my mother; and Bernadette Mayer’s “Works and Days” and Stein’s “Tender Buttons” to my daughter, Gaby. “Tender Buttons” still seems so punk to me and, at the same time, the product of such precise calculations.
Why a “Mark Leyner Reader” now?
If I’m following a paranoid line of reasoning (as I’m apt to do), I’d say it’s a trick, a sort of veiled send-off. As exceedingly, shamelessly, over-the-top proud of it as I am, it can feel a little bit as if someone’s throwing me a retirement party. So if “The Mark Leyner Reader” is indeed a ploy to get me to stop writing, nice try, but I’m not done yet. In fact, I’m just getting started.
What role did you have in the selections?
Absolutely none. That was all the editor Rick Kisonak’s doing. If anyone has a problem with what he chose, and wants to go kick his ass, I’m happy to provide directions to his house.
You’ve described your work as “animated by a spirit of unhinged generosity.” Is that hard to maintain as you age?
Actually not. I was telling Rick Kisonak that a possible interpretation of the title “The Mark Leyner Reader” is that there’s only one reader left (a little joke about my mass appeal). But even that wouldn’t matter much. I’m like one of those deranged soldiers they find on some remote island still fighting a war that’s ended decades ago. I’m a supremely stubborn dude and, honestly, doing this work has never given me a greater sense of jubilation, and I suspect that feeling suffuses the work itself.
Do you have a No. 1 fan? Tell me about him or her.
There’s a marvelous musician by the name of Jonny Polonsky. And when this Jonny Polonsky was in high school, back in the early ’90s, and he was reading my book “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist,” he ran across my phone number, which I’d, perhaps inadvisably, incorporated in the book, and he called it. We’ve developed a close, abiding friendship.
You were one of a trio of young writers famously interviewed on TV by Charlie Rose in 1996. Have you and Jonathan Franzen ever compared notes about it?
We haven’t had the opportunity. But let me run down my two most vivid memories. First of all, I was sporting this horrible, ridiculous goatee, like Jack Cassidy in an old “Love, American Style” episode, which makes it impossible for me to watch even a minute of it. Second, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan hadn’t, I’m fairly sure, done any TV at that point, and they seemed pretty nervous. I’d done quite a bit, including some late-night network shows. As we waited to start taping, David was getting especially jittery, and he asked me if I’d go down to the street and smoke a cigarette with him. While we were down there on the sidewalk smoking, not saying much, out of nowhere he very solemnly apologized for having called me the Antichrist in an interview. I assured him that there was absolutely nothing to apologize for. Anyone who knows me at all would know that being called the Antichrist is just the sort of thing that makes me giddy with delight. I’ll always remember that exchange beyond what actually transpired during the interview itself (which I can’t recall at all, to tell you the truth).
Do you think any canonical books are widely misunderstood?
Definitely the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom.” I find the unrelenting, unmodulated extremity of it LOL hilarious. It’s hard for me to believe that Sade didn’t intend it that way.
What are you working on now?
A memoir of life with my wife, called “The Miniature Marriage.” To make it sound as horrible as possible, it’s a synchronic memoir as opposed to a diachronic one; we see the constituent parts of the marriage all laid out in space (not time), like an exploded diagram for an Ikea sofa bed. And it’s staged as a hybrid of true crime and fairy tale.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
The great proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, the writer and diarist Anaïs Nin and the impossible R.W. Fassbinder. I’m thinking Korean fried chicken and loads of soju and beer.
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