Photo by Nigel Parry for Esquire
Gary on streamlining your device
Rail: What is the function of the character of Fabrizia in the novel?
Shteyngart: For Lenny, Fabrizia is the old world: she sweats, she has actual breasts, an ass and everything—and then he meets Eunice, the new world, Asia, not America, who just streamlines her device.
From The Brooklyn Rail
Gary via the Gary iPhone App
RT @edwardboches: Russian Jews and Koreans have two things in common: love of learning and love of … cabbage.
Gary at the grave of Arcady Dmitrievich Zvezdin of Leningrad, famous singer of songs based on criminal folklore and literature.
From plyshbel
Gary on Misha
NG: Why did you want him to be fat?
GS: He is a son of a very rich businessman, Russian oligarch, and at the same time I wanted him to embody the American ethos of large people. I’ve been always fascinated by the idea that you can kind of eat your way through life. Misha consumes everything: women, politics, antidepressants, psychoanalysis.
Gary molds the minds of today’s youth
Jacky Kwong ’11, who attended the event, said that the event might prompt him to read Shteyngart’s latest book.
“I’m always interested in reading immigrant fiction,” Kwong said, “as a child that grew up in an immigrant family.”
At a Harvard reading, from The Crimson
Gary drops some hints
Q. Are there any movies on the horizon? A. “They keep talking about it; this book I think, yes, we shall see.” Q. Anyone in mind to play Lenny? A. “I think James Franco would be the perfect character … He was my (creative writing) student (at Columbia.)” From Reuters
Gary on Sorokin on Russian Literature
Yet Sorokin was cautiously optimistic about the future. “There has been a literary renaissance in the past few years,” he told me, and then proposed his theory of Russian literature, which, I warn you, involves a bear metaphor: “The Russian bear is big and mostly asleep. He awakes only during revolution, wars, perestroika, and so on, and then he goes back to sleep. When he wakes up, he doesn’t need literature, and there have been no good novels written in these times. But when this bear goes to sleep he sees dreams—and that is Russian literature.”
I tried to picture a Russian literary bear asleep, but, of course, saw only the amiable Sorokin himself.
“So you think the bear has gone to sleep now?” I asked.
“Yes, Putin has come and out everyone to sleep,” Sorokin said.
Letter from Russia: Teen Spirit
The literary scene is a fiefdom ruled by novelist Gary Shteyngart, 37, probably the most successful New York novelist in the under-40 bracket. (His main rival for that title, Jonathan Safran Foer, can be seen as an interesting case of a wannabe Russian, an Updike to his Roth.)
From Klub Prokhorov in NYMag
Beha on Gary on Interiority
Shteyngart makes a compelling case that we lose that interiority—the very thing that gives us depth and richness—when we abandon literary culture. It may be, as so many want to tell us, that this loss is bad for democracy. But that is almost beside the point: It is bad for our souls. As an eloquent lament for this loss, this novel stands as both super sad and true.
From Bookforum
