This book was suggested to me as a "A Brave New World" for the new millenium, with a little "1984" thrown in here and there as well. Those references turned out to be almost mandatory since this book borrows so heavily from both. It also seemed to me that there was a good portion of "A Confederac...
Author emigrates from Russia with mother and father to New York City in 1979 at age 7. They are part of Jimmy Carter's project to bring Jews out of the Soviet Union. Shteyngart effectively shows how hard it was to fit in in 1980s-90s US. Warring parents don't help a massive insecurity complex. It...
Blisteringly honest, funny, and so so sad. Gary Shteyngart, if his memoir is to be believed, was a painfully geeky and excruciatingly lonely child, teen, and adult. His parents, these violent, outrageous and uncouth Soviet Jews, move the family to America in the seventies (when Gary, née Igor, is...
The book starts as a pseudo-surrealist consumer comedy (channeling Evelyn Waugh, who Shteyngart name drops, but more closely related to another New York Writer: Arthur Nersesian) and slips into a tragic farce of geopolitical affairs, globalization and war a la Joseph Heller (also directly cited i...
Somewhere in the middle of this book I wanted to hate it. For reasons unrelated to the book. Or the authorial style. Or the story. I just fell sick. Deep into the night, while the world around me was quietly asleep, I walked in and out of my room. It's 3. Now its 4. And shall it be 6 or 7 when th...
THE HAPPIEST MAN ALIVE HE DECIDED TO date Morgan, the nice girl the crowd had picked up at the Joy. It wasn’t a political decision and not so much an erotic one, although he was attracted to her form and pallor, and, maybe, just maybe, she would make a good Eva to his Juan...
Something really BAD is happening here. These LNWIs ran into my father’s factory when it was closed and took it over and they phased out the LAPD last month and the National Guard won’t do anything and now it’s like we’re going to lose the business or something? I heard my mother and father just ...