num_pages: 368
description: After three acclaimed novelsThe Russian Debutantes Handbook Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love StoryGary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid witty deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor moving insights and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union the curious diminutive asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearningfor food for acceptance for wordsdesires that would follow him into adulthood. At five Igor decided to become a writer and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page he produced. He wrote Lenin and His Magical Goose his first novel.In the late 1970s world events changed Igors life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange tankers of grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to Americaa country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.Shteyngarts loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a conscientious toiler on Wall Street something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian his mother created the term FailurchkaLittle Failurewhich she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.As a result Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer at being a boyfriend and most important at being a worthwhile human being.Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonalds hamburger.Provocative hilarious and inventive Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngarts prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and against all odds a place in the world.
language: English
title: Little Failure
publisher: Random House