Gary Shteyngart

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Lake Success

Little Failure

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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

A memoir

Gary Shteyngart's loving but mismatched 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 deeply 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.

Little Failure is an autobiography of comic genius by the hilarious Gary Shteyngart. 
 
Little Failure - its title the same as the alarming pet-name given to the young Gary Shteyngart by his father when growing up in pre-Glasnost Russia - is one of the most remarkable immigrant memoirs ever written. 
 
A candid and deeply poignant story of a Soviet family's trials and tribulations, and of their escape in 1979 to the consumerist promised land of the USA, it is also an exceptionally funny account of the author's transformation from asthmatic toddler in Red Square to 40-something Manhattanite with a receding hairline and a memoir to write. 
 
 
'Kicks ass - more fantastic, more unbelievable than his novels' Mary Karr, author of The 
Liars' Club 
 
'A marvel of a story. His finest book yet' Zadie Smith 
 
'Little Failure is a delight' Aravid Adiga 
 
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. He writes regularly for the New Yorker.

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.

Little Failure

A memoir

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