In conversation with Allison King, moderated by Laura Spence-Ash; 11:00 – 11:50 am, Presbyterian Parish House
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Shteyngart’s other novels include: Absurdistan (one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year); Super Sad True Love Story (Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize); and Our Country Friends (New York Times bestseller). His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is Vera, or Faith. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.
MFOB featured book: Vera, or Faith
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There’s Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who’s barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half Jewish, half Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school, to keep Daddy and Anne Mom togethe, and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love’s survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Gary Shteyngart is, in the words of the New York Times, “one of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers.”
