SOURCE: "Part Poetry, Part Jai Alai," in The New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1995, p. 12.

In the following review of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, Lord criticizes Leyner's tendency to write self-referential and self-promotional fiction.

I first encountered Mark Leyner's name in the Mystery Quote contest on Echo, a computer bulletin board. In the competition players guess the author of unidentified texts, and wrongly attributed to Mr. Leyner were some wildly dissimilar bits of prose: excerpts from Gore Vidal's spoof of Christianity, Live From Golgotha; the film maker Derek Jarman's thoughts on Caravaggio; and a hard-boiled detective story from Bill Pronzini's collection Son of Gun in Cheek in which a woman is killed by having the air sucked from her lungs with a vacuum cleaner.

Even more startling is how plausible these guesses were. Mr. Leyner's first three books—I Smell Esther Williams, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist...