Shoplifting From Uranus

“Shoplifting From Uranus” is the story of Tao Lin 964, a cybernetic sex slave who is thrown out into the world of 2025 without a memory. Wandering around New New Jersey, 964 is befriended by another memory-wiped sex slave who is part of a group of 500-plus writers who are legally changing their names to variations of “Jonathan Franzen” (i.e. “Franzenn”). They sneak into a middle school and live there while 964 attempts to write their way out of New New Jersey via a science-fiction Holocaust thriller. Soon they find themselves in a genre future of 964’s making – a dead-end time and place where he says he “can't think of anything that seems interesting for the future to have.” “Shoplifting From Uranus” is the latest work of literary appropriation by Mark Leach, author of the 17-million-word “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s longest novel.