Review
------
“Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who
love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times
Book Review
“A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary
Karr
“Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant
story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a
becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is,
unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR
“Literary gold . . . [a] bruisingly funny memoir.”—Vogue
“Funny, unflinching, and, title notwithstanding, a giant success
. . . The innate humor of Shteyngart’s storytelling is dotted
with touching sadness, all of it aing to an engrossing look
at his distinct, multilayered Gary-ness.”—Entertainment Weekly
“[Little Failure] finds the delicate balance between
sidesplitting and heartbreaking.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“An ecstatic depiction of survival, guilt and perseverance . .
. Russia gave birth to that master of English-language prose
named Vladimir Nabokov. Half a century later, another writer who
grew up with Cyrillic characters is gleefully writing American
English as vivid, original and funny as any that contemporary
U.S. literature has to offer.”—Los Angeles Times
“The very best memoirs perfectly toe the line between heartbreak
and humor, and Shteyngart does just that.”—Esquire
“Touching, inful . . . [Shteyngart] nimbly achieves the
noble Nabokovian goal of letting sentiment in without ever
becoming sentimental.”—The Washington Post
“[Shteyngart is] a successor to no less than Saul Bellow and
Philip Roth.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Moving . . . and laugh-out-loud funny.”—USA Today
“Might just be the funniest, most unflinching memoir ever about
coming to America.”—W Magazine
“Hilarious . . . an affectionate take on growing up in gray
Leningrad and Technicolor Queens.”—People
“[Little Failure] feels essential, as the document of a way of
life that’s less and less accessible in our parenting-manual era.
Shteyngart was the child of Russian immigrants whose overzealous
attention shaped him, for better and worse. Little Failure helps
us understand Shteyngart better, but you don’t need to have read
any of his novels to appreciate his frankness and in.”—Time
“A deeply moving love letter to Mr. Shteyngart’s life and
everything in it: America, Russia, literature, women and his
parents.”—The Economist
“Little Failure is terrific—the author’s funniest, saddest and
most honest work to date. [It’s] a powerful and often moving
portrait of a troubled man’s creative origins, comparable in
intent (and sometimes in quality) to some of the genre’s
high-water marks, and owing particular debts to W. G. Sebald,
Thomas Bernhard and, most significantly, Vladimir Nabokov, whose
name Shteyngart often invokes.”—The Guardian (UK)
“[A] keenly observed tale of exile, coming-of-age and family
love: It’s raw, comic and deeply affecting, a testament to Mr.
Shteyngart’s abilities to write with both self-mocking humor and
introspective wisdom, sharp-edged sarcasm and aching—and yes,
Chekhovian—tenderness.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“What a beautiful mess! . . . [Shteyngart has] not just his own
distinct identity, but all the loose ends and unresolved
contradictions out of which great literature is made.” —Charles
Simic, The New York Review of Books
“Shteyngart is a great writer—there’s no arguing his literary
merit—but he’s also very, very funny, which is a rare quality in
literature these days.”—GQ
“Shteyngart’s achingly honest, bittersweet comic memoir is a
winner.”—Vanity Fair
“Little Failure . . . puts the lure in failure.”—The Wall Street
Journal
“A near-perfect account of the churning state of one man’s inner
life.”—The Sunday Times (London)
“[Shteyngart is] the Chekhov-Roth-Apatow of Queens.”—The Millions
“Surely some enterprising scholar is already gnawing at the
question of why two of the brilliant outliers of American writing
were Russian immigrants. One, of course, was the great Vladimir
Nabokov. The other is the youngish Shteyngart. They both have the
qualities of sly humor, secret griefs.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Funny, heartbreaking and soul-baring . . . [Shteyngart is] one
of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers.”—The
Seattle Times
“[A] stellar memoir.”—Parade
“[Shteyngart] has dismantled the armor of his humor to give
readers his most tender and affecting gift yet: himself.”—The
Boston Globe
“[Shteyngart’s] irrepressible humor disguises a Nabokovian love
of the English language and an astute grasp of human
psychology.”—Newsweek
“Shteyngart uses his immigrant experience, together with some of
the wisdom of Russia’s cultural past, to capture a generation of
middle-class Americans . . . and give us a beautifully rendered
world of orange-coloured cheese puffs and Cold War menace.”—The
Times Literary Supplement
“If you thought his fiction was funny, read Shteyngart’s memoir,
Little Failure. As you might expect, he’s no less neurotic than
his characters.”—New York
“Frenetically funny, even overwhelmingly enjoyable.”—Financial
Times
“[Little Failure] should become a classic of the immigrant
narrative genre.”—The Miami Herald
“There is no better comic writer alive than Mr. Shteyngart. . . .
And yet it’s [his] past, and the tension it creates with the
cushy interior life that America affords, that makes him a much
more interesting novelist than his American peers.”—The New York
Observer
“Ever wonder how a Russian émigré with a wicked sense of humor
becomes a great American novelist? In his new memoir, Gary
Shteyngart tells his craziest, funniest, super-saddest tale yet:
his own.”—Francine Prose, Interview
“[Shteyngart’s] best work to date.”—The Moscow Times
“Shteyngart seems to have made a deal with some minor devil (a
daredevil?) stipulating that if he exposed every crack and
fissure in himself, laid bare every misstep, f***up, and psychic
flaw, his memoir would be a deep and original book. If so, the
payoff here was absolutely worth it.”—Kate Christensen, Bookforum
“By turns naive and cynical, hyper-intelligent and comically
immature, empathetic on the page and unfeeling off it, his
self-portrait of a Soviet Jew transed aged seven from
Leningrad to Eighties America is a masterpiece of comic
deprecation.”—The Telegraph (UK)
“This Shteyngart, sad and longing and desperate for connection
(with his parents, with his readers), seems the most fully human
person this author has ever created.”—The Jewish Daily Forward
“The best memoirs are ones that are perfectly individuated,
particular—and yet somehow speak to every reader’s life, every
reader’s family. This is one of those rare books.”—New Statesman
“Many, many people in this world have received blurbs from Gary
Shteyngart, but I happen not to be one of them. So you can trust
me when I say: Little Failure is a delight.”—Zadie Smith, New
York Times bestselling author of NW and White Teeth
“Little Failure is told with fearlessness, wisdom and the wit
that you’d expect from one of America’s funniest novelists.”—Carl
Hiaasen, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Monkey
“Portnoy meets Chekhov meets Shteyngart! What could be
better?”—Adam Gopnik, New York Times bestselling author of The
Table Comes First and Paris to the Moon
“If you, like me, have often wondered, ‘How did Gary Shteyngart
get like that?,’ Little Failure is the heartfelt, moving, and
truly engaging memoir that explains it all. Dr. Freud would be
proud.”—Nathan Englander, author of What We Talk About When We
Talk About Anne Frank
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
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.
Read more ( javascript:void(0) )
See all Editorial Reviews (
/dp/product-description/0812982495/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books&isInIframe=0
)