ABSTRACT
Gary Shteyngart was born in St. Petersburg in 1972 and moved to the United States at the age of seven. Middle class people are living fairly similar lives in this kind of global world, but coming from the Soviet Union to America people may as well have been coming from Venus or Mars. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Oberlin College and not long after published The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story, novels named book of the year and among the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Time Magazine, and numerous other publications. Gary Shteyngart has been awarded the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere and has been translated into twenty-six languages.
