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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mark Leyner
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)

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Book Description

March 26, 2012
From the bestselling and wildly imaginative novelist Mark Leyner, a romp through the excesses and exploits of gods and mortals.

High above the bustling streets of Dubai, in the world's tallest and most luxurious skyscraper, reside the gods and goddesses of the modern world. Since they emerged 14 billion years ago from a bus blaring a tune remarkably similar to the Mister Softee jingle, they've wreaked mischief and havoc on mankind. Unable to control their jealousies, the gods have splintered into several factions, led by the immortal enemies XOXO, Shanice, La Felina, Fast-Cooking Ali, and Mogul Magoo. Ike Karton, an unemployed butcher from New Jersey, is their current obsession.

Ritualistically recited by a cast of drug-addled bards, THE SUGAR FROSTED NUTSACK is Ike's epic story. A raucous tale of gods and men confronting lust, ambition, death, and the eternal verities, it is a wildly fun, wickedly fast gambol through the unmapped corridors of the imagination.

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The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel + The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel + Et Tu, Babe
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The great Mark Leyner has returned. He's brought with him a visionary comedy, a nearly epic exegesis of a wonderfully ludicrous (and somehow completely believable) epic, and, most important, a pantheistic belief system we can all finally get behind. Big ass brilliance on every sun-kissed page." (Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and The Ask )

"This book did all kinds of things to my brain: squeezed it, shocked it, scrambled it and, finally, improved it. There is no one like Mark Leyner in fiction today, and with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, he has found--or invented--a language with which to render the insanity and self-referentiality of our contemporary culture. A chaotic and vibrant novel whose form is perfect for a chaotic and vibrant universe." (Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe )

"The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is dizzyingly brilliant. Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman, who flies the banner of rum and candy and writes like a one-eyed feral bandit. His new book is supremely original, delirious and synapse-shattering." (John Cusack )

"America should treasure its rare, true original voices and Mark Leyner is one of them. So treasure him already, you bastards!" (Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story )

"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 )

"The Sugar Frosted Nutsack proves once again that Mark Leyner is a mad genius, one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes. The gods must be crazy for allowing him to write their collective biography. I want a scrip for whatever drugs he's taking." (Jay McInerney )

"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 backwards 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 )

"Like all great books (The Bible, The Boy Scout's 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 )

"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 )

"This stream-of-consciousness-laden gospel gradually reveals that the book itself is the eternal story of Ike Karton, a 48-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 )

"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 )

"[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...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, The New York Times Book Review )

"To this day, you can bring me 10 contemporary novels with HILARIOUS! stamped all over their covers and I will show you 10 pages of Leyner that are funnier than all of them combined. [The Sugar Frosted Nutsack] is, like Leyner's previous novels, intermittently miraculous and often hilarious. It is also, unlike his previous novels, at times almost achingly sad." (Adam Sternbergh, The New York Times Sunday Magazine )

About the Author

Mark Leyner is the author of the novels My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Et Tu, Babe and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller, Why Do Men Have Nipples? He cowrote the movie War, Inc. and lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (March 26, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0316608459
  • ISBN-13: 978-0316608459
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 1 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #103,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars The gimmick gets old May 31, 2012
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I purchased this novel after a glowing New York Times book review and because the title is just that eye-catching. The NYTimes reviewer lauded Mark Leyner's narrative style as possibly heralding a new era of non-linear, less structured novels. I found it grating after a while.

The premise is promising, starting off with the idea that the gods, similar to the ancient gods of Greece, are more often out for their own interests than the modern conception of a benevolent unitary God who looks out for the human race. These guys are a bunch of infighting, labidinous and amoral louts. So far so good. And the central figure of the novel is a seemingly innocuous human whose death (self-murder by Mossad or the FBI or someone) is foretold from the very beginning, and repeatedly brought up in the context of blind, chanting monks who have told his story over milennia, even before his birth. Also so far so good.

But it gets old after a while. The repetition; the stringing together of obscure and more widely known cultural references; the foul language. I got bored and didn't care about half-way through the novel and skimmed the last quarter just to get to the end. This novel is a flash in the pan and I doubt it will have much salience for readers in a few years, let alone a decade or more from now (not that that is the only basis on which to judge a novel).
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A New Hilarious Novel from Mark Leyner June 11, 2012
Format:Hardcover
Reading Mark Leyner's latest novel is truly a literary road-trip through the author's fertile imagination. Leyner has written the wildest, funniest, creation-myth of a novel that I've ever encountered, playing fast and loose with literary conventions associated with the novel and memoir. Is it a straightforward fictional account of the protagonists, the GODS and one luckless modern day mortal, unemployed New Jersey butcher Ike Karton? Is it a memoir of their exploits across the vast gulf of fourteen billion years? No, it's a bit of both, with ample references to everything from current day American sports and entertainment celebrities to brief historical lessons on the origin of World War I. It's a hysterically funny example of meta-fiction, rich in amusing digressions and predictions regarding the probable fates of each of the protagonists, treating them as though they are the potential sources of a new, latter day Olympian mythology. Considering Mark Leyner's past history of bending literary conventions, readers should know that anything is possible from him, and his latest novel is truly a mind-blowing amusement park of a ride that will leave them both astonished and entertained all the way till the very end.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Expect something novel, not "a novel" August 24, 2012
By Marco
Format:Hardcover
I imagine most people who read this book will either love it or hate it. And if you already know Mark Leyner's work, this book will only make your opinion stronger.

I do love Leyner's books (except the doctor books he co-authored), and after The Tetherballs of Bougainville I wondered what Leyner would do next. For a while it looked like he was done with fiction, that he he devoured his own narrative, and we had fifteen years of (sort of) silence. Fortunately he has returned, as only he can, by amping up the possibilities of the novel (if this must be given that label).

I don't even know how to begin describing it. It is a book about itself, like the universe, filled with qabalistic self-references, repetitions that unblossom and mutate, cut-ups and samples that are equal parts William Burroughs, Wikipedia, YouTube comments, and -- as the book itself describes it -- Detroit techno music. Yeah, I think if you're wondering how this book is different, look at how techno was different from traditional songwriting that came before it. The book's repetitions really do have a musical effect, and if you go along with it, I think you will enjoy it.

I read the last 150 pages in a day and I recommend you read this book in one or two sustained chunks to get the full effect.

Great book, and I hope to hear more from Leyner soon. Like Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce or Picasso, he does things differently. There is no other book quite like this, and I cannot even conceive of the labor involved in writing it. It is a joy to read, and I am sure I will read it again.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars No redeeming social value
A story without a plot, no characters of interest, profanity without a cause or need, repetitous, humorless, and written with a vocabulary designed to impart wisdom and... Read more
Published 5 days ago by Vern David
5.0 out of 5 stars Can't help if there's swine in the heard when casting pearls
I pity Mark Leyner for feeling compelled to create a brilliant work of literature at a time when the general public has turned into something resembling a cesspool of dunces. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Darwin Holmstrom
3.0 out of 5 stars Good not his best
I'm going to re-read Howie Weener Unclogged: A Colonic Noir Musical Memoir http://amzn.to/13js5B4
There is a similarity, lots of laughs, and lots of originality.
Published 2 months ago by Comedy Snob
4.0 out of 5 stars Brain Burn.
The best way to describe this novel? Tedious pandemonium. The perfect literary example of controlled chaos. An especially challenging read that will leave your brain burning. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Justin Knipper
1.0 out of 5 stars I got suckered by a synopsis
This book was chosen by my book club. I will admit that, based on the book synopsis that was provided, I voted for it, thinking it would be crazy but fun. Read more
Published 5 months ago by panda23
1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible
Just...horrible. Finally gave up after 120 pages after peeking ahead to see if this was going anywhere. Nope.
Are all his books like this?
Published 6 months ago by plato
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother
Interesting literary concept, but impossible to follow.. even if you wanted to and after 20 pages I didn't . Read more
Published 8 months ago by LDM
1.0 out of 5 stars In the air
As I read this book I thought that the author threw a bunch of words up in the air and compiled them however they landed and that's this book.
Published 8 months ago by Larry Weinberg
1.0 out of 5 stars This book is painfully repetitive, I repeat PAINFULLY...
The problem with writing a story about a repetitive, redundant, cyclical, recursive, self-referencing, self-flagellating piece of word-porn nonsense is that unless you are Samuel... Read more
Published 8 months ago by P Chytla
1.0 out of 5 stars Waste of Time...
Review:

I had to do a double-take when I saw this cover on Amazon, what in the world is that about??? Read more
Published 9 months ago by The Paperback Pursuer
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