Gary Shteyngart
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Gary Shteyngart (born 1972) is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.
Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003) and Absurdistan (2006), and his other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times. A third novel, set in Albany in the year 2040, will feature protagonist "Jerry Shteynfarb", a Russian émigré writing instructor who was the distant nemesis of the main character of Absurdistan.
Shteyngart's family left the Soviet Union when he was seven, and, after being forbidden to return to Russia, a trip to Prague helped spawn his first work, set in the fictitious European city of Prava. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, Shteyngart now lives in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and has taught writing at Columbia University.
[edit] Bibliography
- The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003)
- Absurdistan (2006)
[edit] External links
- Biography at barnesandnoble.com
- Interview in the Forward
- Interview at Web del Sol.
- Interview from Modern Drunkard Magazine titled '10 Drinks with Gary Shteyngart'.
- "Absurdistan", by Gary Shteyngart – Russian Unorthodox, review by Walter Kirn, New York Times, April 30, 2006
