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. 

Praise:

“Equal parts hilarity and horror…virtuosic.” (New York Times)

“Poetic and extraordinarily strange.” (Buzzfeed)

“An intriguing literary page-turner.” (Curator)

About the author: 

Mark Leidner is is a Georgia-born writer of books and films. His latest book is 2018’s Under the Sea, and his latest film is the 2019 sci-fi thriller Empathy, Inc. He resides in Atlanta and is @markleidner on Twitter and Instagram.