Mark Leidner – författare

Under the Sea is Mark Leidner's debut story collection published by Tyrant Books in 2018 and named a best book of the year by Buzzfeed, Spinoff, and The New Statesman. In the gripping opener "e;Bad-Asses,"e; a naive drug dealer's stash is stolen, leading her to unleash her inner bad-ass as she tries to recover it. In the bizarre and hilarious "e;21 Extremely Bad Breakups,"e; each breakup is more absurd than the last: lovers get side-swiped by speeding busses, play paper-rock-scissors with each others lives, cause an asteroid to destroy the planet, and more. In "e;Under the Sea,"e; a woman with one day to live has an affair with a loser she picks up at a video game arcade. In the unbelievably epic "e;Avern-Y6,"e; a despondent insect gets shitfaced at the brink of a colony-wide civil war, only to learn he has an role to play in history after all. A social outcast going off on some teens in a bougie cafe, a depressed man in a physical fight with an interdimensional void, a middle-school student waxing memoiristic about heartbreak, a self-defeating academic sending a career-ending email - indelible characters are the heart of every story's wild ride in Under the Sea. Mark Leidner is a Georgia-born writer of books and films. He resides in Atlanta and is @markleidner on Twitter and Instagram.

The followup to his beloved debut collection Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me, Mark Leidner's Returning the Sword to the Stone is simultaneously profound and irreverent, in the same way that the world is flat as we walk and round as we live. "A child surprised that a neon sign / isn't hot the first time they touch one / knows how it feels as an adult to achieve one's goals" states the speaker of "Youth Is A Fugitive" and this sentiment is one of the central precepts of Returning the Sword to the Stone. Congealing directly off the page, these are poems that only Mark Leidner could have written.