Posts From Author: queens

Big Success in Little Failure

1979. Coming to America after a childhood spent in the Soviet Union is equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor. — Gary Shteyngart I’m pleased to report that Gary Shteyngart’s memoir, Little Failure, in no way lives up to its title. Instead, it’s a brilliant, milk-snortingly funny ride from 1970s Leningrad through 1980s Queens to 1990s Ohio and beyond. The humour you might expect from the novelist behind The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (Riverhead, 2002), Absurdistan (Random House, 2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010) is all present and correct. But that’s not all. Little Failure is also a sad-funny-awkward portrait of Shteyngart’s parents, whose Russian ways and tiny failures of assimilation so acutely embarrass and enrage him while growing up. Returning with them to Russia as an adult toward the end of the book, he makes discoveries about their past, his own prehistory, that shed new light on the rest of the book’s action. Much of Little Failure concerns Gary’s difficult formative years following his emigration in 1979 (he was born in 1972). Debilitating asthma prevents his becoming athletic; in the wake of Reagan’s “evil empire” speech, his Russian-ness alienates him from his Jewish schoolmates at the Solomon Schechter School […]
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Curtain Call: Inside the Lie

Seriously Entertaining is back! The first of our two shows this fall, Inside the Lie, hits City Winery on Monday, September 29, with a mind-expanding line-up of literary talent. Don’t have your tickets yet? Check out our writers below in an audiovisual preview of some of the pleasures that await you. Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist specializing in particle cosmology. He’s also one of the great elucidators. Gleiser’s work is remarkably accessible, cracking open the hardest nuts of quantum physics and cosmology for the general reader. Books include The Prophet and the Astronomer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), which investigates the ongoing search for meaning in the stars, and, most recently, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014). Read our review of The Island of Knowledge here, follow Marcelo on Twitter, and watch his Ted Talk on the origins of life here: John Guare‘s fifty-year career on the American stage and screen has been marked by some stunning highs, including the Tony Award-winning success of The House of Blue Leaves, Louis Malle’s classic 1980 movie Atlantic City, starring Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon, and, more recently, A Free Man of Color (2010). Check out our survey of […]
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