Mark Leyner Gets the Reader Treatment

I’ve worked as a bookseller for twenty-seven years now, and it’s interesting to see which writers and books—fairly or not—have endured, and which writers and books have faded from memory. Like a lot of weird things I was really into back in the 1990s, the early books of Mark Leyner seem to be fairly unknown to today’s younger readers and the general public. For a writer famous (and interesting) enough to appear on episodes of The Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and, most famously, the 1996 episode of Charlie Rose, where he matched wits with Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace (who had once—before this interview, called Leyner “the anti-Christ of American literature”) discussing the state of publishing and books, Leyner now seems like the lost black sheep or odd man out.