About the Author

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.

Reviews

"Rowdy, ribald, funny...this superb debut [is] the real thing."—Esquire"As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..."—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post"A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American."—Harper's Bazaar"The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures."—Elle"If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written."—Time Out New York"[Gary Shteyngart's] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." —O. Magazine

Orwell once remarked that the narrator of Tropic of Cancer was so far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. Shteyngart, whose sensibility is allied with Miller's, takes a passive character, Vladimir Girshkin, and makes him briefly proactivewith disastrous resultsin his smart debut novel. Vladimir is the son of immigrants who came to the U.S. via a Carter administration swap (American wheat for Russian Jews); his father, a doctor prone to dreams of suicide and complicated medical schemes, and his mother, an entrepreneur who makes fun of her son's gait, give him the inestimable gift of alienation. In true slacker fashion, Vladimir, at 25, is wasting his expensive education clerking at the Emma Lazarus Immigration Absorption Society. A client, Rybakov, bribes Vladimir to get him American citizenship, confiding that his son, the Groundhog, is a leading businessman (in prostitutes and drugs) in Pravathe Paris of the nineties in the fictional Republika Stolovaya. Vladimir fakes a citizenship ceremony for Rybakov in order to curry favor with the Groundhog. Then, because he has unwisely repelled the sexual advances of crime boss Jordi while trying to make some illicit bucks to keep his girlfriend, Francesca, in squid and sake dinners in Manhattan, Vladimir leaves abruptly for Prava. Once there, and backed by the Groundhog, Vladimir embarks on a scheme to fleece the American students who have flocked to Prava's legendary scene. Although the satire on the expatriate American community is a little too easy, Shteyngart's Vladimir remains an impressive piece of work, an amoral buffoon who energizes this remarkably mature work. (June) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

"Rowdy, ribald, funny...this superb debut [is] the real thing."-Esquire"As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times"In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..."-Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post"A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American."-Harper's Bazaar"The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures."-Elle"If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written."-Time Out New York"[Gary Shteyngart's] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." -O. Magazine