A community theater s production of Special Yearnings triggers a string of underground nuclear explosions from St. Louis to Worcester Massachusetts. A man frantically swats at the blaze that his girlfriend has ignited in his trousers while her family tries to figure out whether his agonized sign language means Under the Volcano or No Time for Sergeants. Charo Marianne Faithfull and Napoleon s sister swap glittering witticisms and pornographic come-ons with languid aesthetes and unhinged suburbanites. Such scenarios are just par for the course in this gloriously disorienting volume by Mark Leyner author of My Cousin My Gastroenterologist and Et Tu Babe and a writer who plays the English language the way Jimi Hendrix played the guitar: at blinding speed dangerous volume and with a perfect mixture of lyricism and sheer menace.