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 Bad-Asses, 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 21 Extremely Bad Breakups, 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 Under the Sea, 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 Avern-Y6, 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 café, 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.
