On Wired, Alice Gregory interviews Mark Leyner about the publication of his latest (and long, long awaited) novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. Leyner's been a favorite of mine since I had my mind blown by My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, an almost indescribably weird (and convulsively funny) collection of sf stories made out of pure awesome. I can't believe it's been 15 years since his last fiction, and Nutsack sounds like it was worth the wait: "gods splinter into competitive factions, bicker in Dubai, and infect the mind of Ike Karton, an out-of-work butcher from New Jersey."

Wired: As a self-consciously "current" writer, was it hard to write something that felt fresh and of-the-moment after so much time away?

Leyner: That's a question that filled me with trepidation. The other books felt so congruent with the zeitgeist. When I started writing, I was a more social person, and I'm probably a bit more solitary now. My process was to just steep myself in my obsessions — all the capricious and fetishistic thinking that I'm engaged in. If I concerned myself with contemporary references, it would just detract from the strangeness of the book.

Wired: Your prose is data-rich: It features arcane medical jargon and tabloid factoids. What are your reading habits like? Do you have a system?

Leyner: I suppose I have a system, but it's not really an a priori system. If at any given moment I look at the books that pile up next to the bed or in the space where I work, it looks like someone who is trying to read the most insanely miscellaneous and contradictory selection of books possible. Some of it is because I have very wide-ranging interests, but then some of this is because my reading is very tangential. I'll read 30-40 pages, and then something will move me, so I'll put that book down and start reading something else. They always tend to superimpose themselves on top of one another. I'm reading a book now about Stalin's military prowess, and then I'm reading a really wonderful book by the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. Could there be more contradictory things than those two?