Gary Shteyngart: The Man, the Myth, the Blurbs

Gary Shteyngart burst onto the literary scene in 2002 with The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, his sublimely hilarious tale of one Vladimir Girshkin, “the immigrant’s immigrant, the expatriate’s expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times.” The decade hence brought us two more smashing Shteyngartistic feats–Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2010)–and enough book blurbs to secure the writer a record or two in the Guinness Book, which probably already features his pithy praise on its back cover.