By turns imaginative, verbose, and iconoclastic, Mark Leyner is a humorist and experimentalist who tackles the often ridiculous products of postmodern culture and squeezes new hybrids out of them, ranging from military academies of beauty to weight-loss camps for terrorists to custom-built designer electric chairs. Leyner has also crafted a postmodern world citizenry made up of methedrine-suppository-ingesting haiku poets, transsexual teamsters, samurai tetherball players, and every gene-spliced person in between. One cannot help but laugh at such outrageous creations, but not without also pausing to consider the incisive critique of the excesses of contemporary American life that lies beneath what David Foster Wallace, in an interview with Larry McCaffery, once termed Leyner's "hip cynicism." Leyner's fiction speaks the lingua franca of the MTV generation, and it utilizes stylistic techniques derived from such forms of mass communication as television, advertising, software programs, technical manuals, informational brochures, and exercise videos...