Gary Shteyngart

Gary Steyngart at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April 2008

Gary Shteyngart , real name Igor Semyonowitsch Shteyngart (born July 5, 1972 in Leningrad ) is an American cultural journalist and writer of Russian origin.

Life

Gary Shteyngart emigrated to Queens , New York City with his Jewish- Russian parents at the age of seven . After spending some time in Prague in the early 1990s , he studied political science at Oberlin College . He then worked for various non-profit organizations in New York.

He finished his debut as a novelist Handbook for Russian Debutants (2002) in Baku , Azerbaijan . There, the author also researched for his second novel Snack Daddys Adventurous Journey . In it, a 147 kilogram rapper named Mischa "Snack Daddy" Vainberg plays the role of a tragicomic unlucky fellow. In 2010 his book Super Sad True Love Story was published by Granta. The German translation was published in 2011. Shteyngart's favorite novel is Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov and “and maybe Little Failure is also… a hidden homage to Pnin ”.

As a travel and culture journalist, Shteyngart publishes in The New Yorker , the British literary magazine Granta , The New York Times and the lifestyle magazine Travel & Leisure . Shteyngart lives in New York City .

Shteyngart was a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in autumn 2007 .

In his 2019 novel Willkommen in Lake Success , he affectionately and sarcastically describes a neurotic member of the wealthy one percent upper class, who in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, in the immediate run-up to the Trump election, did a greyhound bus tour across the United States all the way down to Mexico undertakes. The author took this road movie trip himself for research purposes and claims that he "only noticed while writing how much the book reflects the Trump era".

Works

• The Russian Debutante's Handbook. Riverhead Books, New York 2002 ISBN 1-57322-213-5
  • Handbook for the Russian debutante . Translated by Christiane Buchner, Frank Heibert . Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2005 ISBN 3-8333-0297-6
• Absurdistan . Random House, 2006
  • Snack Daddy's Adventurous Journey . Translator Robin Detje . Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008 ISBN 978-3-8333-0543-6
• Super Sad True Love Story . Random House, New York 2010 ISBN 978-1-4000-6640-7
  • Super Sad True Love Story. Translated by Ingo Herzke . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2011 ISBN 978-3-498-06414-3
• Little failure. A memoir. Random House, New York 2014 ISBN 978-0-679-64375-3
  • Little loser. Translated by Mayela Gerhardt. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2015 ISBN 978-3-498-06432-7
• Lake Success . Random House, New York City, 2018
  • Welcome to Lake Success . Novel. Translated by Ingo Herzke. Penguin Verlag, Munich 2019 ISBN 978-3-328-60069-5

literature

• Sebastian Pirling: Super Sad True Love Story. In: Wolfgang Jeschke , Sascha Mamczak , Sebastian Pirling (eds.): Das Science Fiction Jahr 2012. Heyne, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-453-52972-4 , pp. 395-400.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gary Shteyngart in the catalog of the German National Library
• Shteyngart in “What I've always wanted to ask myself”, writer in self-talk , MP3 on Deutschlandradio Kultur

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The fall of America. Interview. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung . July 10, 2011, p. 23.
2. ↑ Hannes Stein : “Why did I become a writer? Please, did I have a choice? ” , Interview, in: Die Literarisches Welt , July 25, 2015, p. 3.
3. ↑ Citigroup Distinguished Visitor, Class of Fall 2007 ( Memento of the original from May 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Cornelius Dieckmann: Gary Shteyngart's new novel: "Even the villain has a soul" , review in the FAZ on April 28, 2019, accessed April 29, 2019
5. ↑ US satirist Gary Shteyngart: "America loves impostors" , interview on Spiegel Online April 14, 2019, accessed April 29, 2019