Mark Leyner

Gone with the Mind Mark Leyner

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.