A memoir

Little Failure

Little Failure is Gary Shteyngart's bestselling and very funny memoir. 
 
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
In 1979 seven-year-old Gary Shteyngart and his parents left the Soviet Union for the consumerist paradise of America. As good Russian Jews, Gary's parents were determined that he make something of himself. As a diminutive asthmatic with a runny nose, Gary knew his was to be a life of spectacular disappointments. He wasn't wrong. In Little Failure he reveals how, by ending up a prize-winning novelist, he visited great shame on his family. 
 
'Dazzling, exquisitely charted. Time spent with Shteyngart is like being with Woody Allen on speed: razor-sharp, funny and deeply moving' Mail on Sunday 
 
'A marvel of a story. His finest book yet' Zadie Smith 
 
'An immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story. Dazzling' Meg Wolitzer 
 
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972. In 2007 he was named one of Granta's Best Young American novelists. His debut The Russian Debutante's Handbook was widely acclaimed (and won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), as were his second, Absurdistan (one of the 10 Best Books of the Year in the New York Times) and Super Sad True Love Story (which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize).

A memoir for the ages ... Un-put-down-able ... Little Failure is his best book to date

Shteyngart has carried the spirit of Russian literature into the iPhones, subways and suburbs of America

A marvel of a story. His finest book yet.

People who think Gary Shteyngart is a very funny man and a complete pervert are in for a shock by the time they finish this memoir: he turns out to be a very complete man and a funny pervert. Little Failure is a delight

I'm always wary when a young writer offers up a memoir, but Gary Shteyngart delivers big-time with Little Failure. His family's story is quite remarkable, and it's told with fearlessness, wisdom and the wit that you'd expect from one of America's funniest novelists

If you, like me, have often wondered: How did Gary Shteyngart get like that? Little Failure is the heartfelt, moving, and truly engaging memoir that explains it all. Dr. Freud would be proud

Portnoy meets Chekhov meets Shteyngart!  What could be better?

Hilarious, moving, compelling . . . Thanks to Little Failure, the army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger

Little Failure finds the delicate balance between side-splitting and heart-breaking

Dazzling, highly enjoyable book. Little Failure is a rich, nuanced memoir. It's an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success

An ecstatic depiction of survival, guilt and perseverance. . . . Russia gave birth to that master of English-language prose named Vladimir Nabokov. Half a century later, another writer who grew up with Cyrillic characters is gleefully writing American English as vivid, original and funny as any that contemporary U.S. literature has to offer. That writer is Gary Shteyngart

Nimbly achieves the noble Nabokovian goal of letting sentiment in without ever becoming sentimental

If you thought his fiction was funny, read Shteyngart's memoir. [A] deeply moving, honest evocation of growing up

Mr Shteyngart's evocative new memoir, Little Failure, is as entertaining as it's moving. . . keenly observed tale of exile, coming-of-age and family love: It's raw, comic and deeply affecting, a testament to Mr Shteyngart's abilities to write with both self-mocking humor and introspective wisdom, sharp-edged sarcasm and aching - and yes, Chekhovian - tenderness

Deeply moving, big-hearted, meaningful and poignant. Mr Shteyngart is funny - and not just knowing-nod, wry-smile funny, but laugh-aloud, drink-no-liquids-while-reading funny. [And]] underlying his writing, always, is yearning, love and often deep sadness

A near-perfect account of the churning state of one man's inner life . . . irresistibly funny . . . tinged with sadness

By turns naïve and cynical, hyper-intelligent and comically immature . . . a masterpiece of comic deprecation

A powerful and often moving portrait of a troubled man's creative origins. Little Failure is terrific . . . the author's funniest, saddest and most honest work to date

Gary Shtengart uses his immigrant experience . . . to capture a generation of middle-class Americans and give us a beautifully rendered world of orange-coloured cheese puffs and Cold War menace

Hilarious. Raw, moving, uproarious and melancholy all at the same time

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction) and Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.

Gary Shteyngart's parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer, or at least an accountant, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka-'Little Failure'-which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly. 
 
A candid and poignant story of a Soviet family's trials and tribulations, and of their escape in 1979 to the consumerist promised land of the USA, Little Failure is also an exceptionally funny account of the author's transformation from asthmatic toddler in Leningrad to 40-something Manhattanite with a receding hairline and a memoir to write.

Gary Shteyngart

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspirational. He captures what Philip Roth once called the 'indigenous American berserk'

A novel in  which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced

Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity

An unforgettable road trip through an America that's ominously divided, wildly diverse, and weirdly familiar. Gary Shteyngart writes with brutal honesty, virtuoso wit, and stubborn compassion for his deeply flawed but still somehow lovable characters

Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of 'The Leftovers'

The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [and] a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. Epic, melancholy, staggeringly beautiful

Maria Semple, author of 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette?'

A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times

A novel reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute. I barked with laughter, at the same time as wincing in pain. Shteyngart has held up a mirror to American culture that is so accurate and so devastating... Stupendous

Lake Success is a genial and warm-hearted book...a virtuoso piece of work, full of brilliant noticings...an unhysterical novel about a hysterical country at a hysterical time - the work of a novelist who believes in the power of fiction to illuminate out shared world.

Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos.... A stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort

The satirical layering is masterful. Dark - so dark - yet delicious.

Lake Success is undeniably enjoyable, rattling along with good jokes and sharp set pieces, and shot through with Shteyngart's good-natured melancholy.

Referencing classic novels like The Great Gatsby and On the Road, Shteyngart whips up a novel that's part-satire and part-comedy of manners, humanising the super-rich while casting a critical eye over their world. It's funny, cutting, but above all compassionate

Shteyngart's comic energy is well deployed on the ridiculously rich, especially amid Trump's campaign and his election by, perhaps, many Greyhound riders.

Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a second chance at life... 
 
Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with a deep emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now, while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.

Gary Shteyngart

Praise for Lake Success

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Books by Gary Shteyngart

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Praise for Lake Success

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him

Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted

SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

Books by Gary Shteyngart

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...

**SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today.** By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspira ...