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    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

    Published by Hachette Audio

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMar 26, 2012
    ISBN9781611135152
    Unavailable
    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

    3/5

    46 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Uggnahgahhh...

      Conceptually fun; tedious in execution.
    • 3/5
      This is roughly what John Barth's novella cycle Chimera would be if it were actually funny. Which is to say, it's pretty good!
    • 1/5
      Review: I had to do a double-take when I saw this cover on Amazon, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack...? What in the world is that about??? There were quite a few plot scenarios going through my head in that moment, but not one of them came close to the asinine truth. I can find something good to say about every book I read, but this... novel... threw me for a loop. I had to force myself to get past chapter one, the language and ridiculous names/concepts insulting. I understood that there were Gods and Goddesses, and that they all had a few "screws loose", but other than that, I couldn't figure out what in the world was actually happening. The characters seemed to do things for no reason in particular, and without reason there was only chaos - a collection of nonsensical phrases leading nowhere. I guess the only redeemable qualities I could find were Mark Leyner's word choices and sentence formats, but even they could not make me overlook the obvious flaws. I felt like I was trying to read as fast as humanly possible in order to finish, the inane characters and dialogue far from attention-worthy. I usually prefer ideas that are out-of-the box, but the highly repetitive and annoying dialogue left me drowning and confused in a sea of sugar frosted frivolity. Enjoyed the handful of laughs, but overall, I felt that the book was, "artisanal bull[****] of the highest order," (TSFN p.199). I can not honestly recommend this as suitable reading material for any age...Rating: Toe-Tag (1/5)*** I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
    • 5/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)It would not be off the mark to call Mark Leyner the "King of the Bizarro Authors," given that he is one of the only practitioners in the whole country of this "Monty Python meets Psychobilly" subgenre to regularly score lucrative contracts with large mainstream publishers, and to be featured in such national media outlets as Entertainment Weekly. And now after a long hiatus, he's finally back with a new novel, the appropriately absurdist The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; and after reading through this latest inspired piece of weirdness, it's easy to see why he's the undisputed king of this particular genre, because the pure sense of imagination that Leyner brings to the table far outstrips almost anything that almost any other American bizarro author is writing these days. Ostensibly about a group of ancient gods that are still around to meddle in human affairs, now living in a penthouse apartment at the top of a Dubai skyscraper, like most bizarro novels this is merely chapter-one window-dressing so that the marketing people have something to write on the dust jacket, with the story quickly expanding so to eventually be about everything in the world and nothing all at the same time, a gloriously chaotic wallowing in the pure joy of language itself, a proud literary tradition that (with a little squinting) can be directly traced all the way back to G.K. Chesterton at the end of the Victorian Age. Granted, this is a bawdy and hyperactive version of Chesterton, but I believe that proto-nerd would highly approve of the work of Mark Leyner; and so will fans of Douglas Adams, Will Self, David David Katzman and Hunter S. Thompson, a clever stream-of-consciousness fairytale that's best experienced by passing it quickly from one ear through the other, and letting the burningly unique images seer a tattoo on the back of your psychic retinas.Out of 10: 9.0, or 10 for fans of bizarro fiction
    • 3/5
      Mark Leyner's new book has been getting a lot of media attention, partly because it's a "comeback" book, and partly because he is associated with the generation that includes David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen. (Apparently there is a YouTube video of an old episode of "Charlie Rose" with Leyner, Wallace, and Franzen as the guests, made before Franzen was widely known.) The reviews I have seen praise Leyner mainly for going there: he says things and writes in ways that are not usually permitted in novels. (One reviewer put it that way: he was astonished at what he read, and wondered, "Is that permitted?") People say his writing is astonishing, virtuoso, brilliant. People find him hilarious; reviewers mention how they laughed -- often, loudly, even continuously. An especially common sentiment is that his work makes other novels seem old-fashioned. Here is one of the Amazon reviews, in full:"It took me exactly 3 pages of this book to make me realize that I've been ever so slightly bored with every other book I've read... since Leyner's last book. This is the divine comedy."I won't deny I smiled a number of times reading the book: it would be hard not to smile when Leyner is telling us, for example, that J.D. Salinger wrote an article with A.J. Foyt and published it in "Highlights for Children." The book's central conceit, that the universe is run by a white van-load full of gods who appeared about 14 billion years ago and are obsessed with someone named Ike who lives in New Jersey, is the kind of opening move that announces -- all by itself, with no need for an accompanying novel -- that as soon as any rule of novel writing, or even of propriety, appears, it will be happily broken. But I never laughed reading "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack." I tried to picture the sort of reader Leyner was imagining: such a person would come to the novel with her head filled with Austen, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Forster, Greene, Roth, Updike, and especially Franzen, Ford, McCarthy, Proulx... and by the very first page they'd be shocked, dismayed, and delighted. (This is one reason, I think, why Wallace once envied Leyner, even though Wallace tried hard not to depend on fireworks, paranoia, virtuoso writing, and hallucigenic scenarios.) It is more difficult to imagine the kind of reader for whom the entire book is funny, joke after joke. Several reviewers hinted that the book became boring, but reviewers who liked "The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack" (like the one quoted above) tend to identify it as a kind of revelation of the inherently boring nature of other books. Boredom figures in Leyner's work in a complicated way; for me, thinking about boredom was the most interesting part of reading.The book staves off something that counts as boredom by keeping up a nearly uniform pitch of hysteria. In the entire book there are only a few moments in which the narrator's voice relaxes -- when the double exclamation marks, italics, pop culture references, scattered references, Pynchonesque paranoia, Barth-like meta-references, all around goofiness, and boldface celebrity names let up just a little. One such passage is a list of things that Ike, the hero, loved about his childhood. Without its context, that list would be a lyrical, unironic, nostalgic evocation of memories that have largely been lost. In context, it's drowned out by the gods and their craziness. Another passage, also a list, is about what men can understand about women. It turns out it was plagiarized from "O," Oprah's magazine. The novel itself admits that, and it's also credited in the endpapers. Out of context, that list would be sincere and heartfelt (as it would have been in "O"); in the novel it's said that people who take the list that way are hard to figure out.What, then, cold count as boredom in this book? Here are two possible positions:1. For me, it's the flood of writing itself that became boring, mainly because it was unmodulated (except for those interesting brief passages), and also because the individual jokes weren't funny. And that, in turn, was because I am used to unexpected juxtapositions of high and low culture, past and present, sense and nonsense, seriousness and irony: those kinds of jolts were a stock in trade of first-generation postmodernism. If you find it humorous to see Mircea Eliade's name juxtaposed with the name the god of testicles, that may be because you are anxious about the values and meanings of serious culture, philosophy, high art, and so forth, so it's a relief to see them deflated. If you aren't anxious, then it isn't especially funny to see those juxtapositions: they are a little funny, sure, but not in a sustainable way.2. For some of Leyner's fans, the flood is the opposite of boring, and it reveals the fundamentally boring nature of other novels. Readers who are energized by a continuous barrage of wild writing are, I think, good examples of what the philosopher Karsten Harries called the "kitsch economy." In kitsch, what matters is effects, and in each repetition they have to be done more intensely, more densely, than before. The "kitsch economy" is tied to perpetual inflation: each new novel, film, painting, or composition has to have more special effects than the one before, because the effect of each innovation -- the hit, the force of the drug -- wears off. Readers who find that Leyner makes other novelists boring will soon be needing him, or someone else, to be more outrageous, more condensed, more brilliant...Boredom and its opposites (attention, immersion, absorption) are one of the themes that makes the book interesting. Another is what counts as funny, and why. Those were the kinds of things I was thinking of as I read. The book's repetitiveness, which some reviewers criticized, is part of the whole game: if what matters is to be entertained continuously, with no letup, and if one of the ways of accomplishing that is to be perverse, then what better strategy than to make repetition part of the plot? The book would have been twice as good if it were twice as long. Or, in the spirit of Oulipo: it would have been a thousand times as good if it were a thousand times longer.
    • 4/5
      A pantheon of hungover deities roll into the universe on a bus playing something that sounds a lot like the Mister Softee jingle, take residence in Dubai's Burj Khalifa, and turn their collective gaze on Ike Karton, a 48-year-old, 5'7", unemployed, Jersey City butcher.

      The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is exactly the sort of next novel you might expect from Mark Leyner, in that Mark Leyner's indescribable, hyper-experimental, postmodern fiction generally defies the notion of expectation. If you expect however that it's hilarious, you wont't be disappointed.