Little Failure, the new memoir from bestselling author Gary Shteyngart, is finally here! We’re big fans of Shteyngart’s novels and highly recommend this story of his life as a boy who immigrated with his family to Queens from Russia and went on to become, with the help of a one-armed Chewbacca action figure, a great American novelist. Funny, touching and absorbing, this book is a pleasure to read whether you’re a fan of Shteyngart’s or new to his particular blend of humor, pathos and Russian idioms.
We highly recommend you watch the trailer.
We also highly recommend that you join us here on Thursday, February 13 at 7pm for a special Valentine’s Eve event with Gary, at which we will present him with all of the appropriate signs of our adoration, in exchange for which he will read from and sign copies of Little Failure.
If you can’t make it to the event, you can pre-order a signed copy via our website. We ship all over the world.
Look at that face. You know you love that face.
While we eagerly await Gary’s visit to Austin, allow us to offer a brief round up of the star-studded roster of blurbers and reviewers who have praised Little Failure:
ZADIE SMITH
bestselling author of NW and White Teeth:
“Many, many people in this world have received blurbs from Gary Shteyngart, but I happen not to be one of them. So you can trust me when I say: Little Failure is a delight. You ask me if it’s funny? Naturally it’s funny—he’s always funny. But this book is also a super sad true love story: between Gary and Lenin, Gary and his parents, Gary and women, Gary and food, Gary and America, Gary and Russia, Gary and the English language itself. And alongside the jokes and the (frankly unbelievable) photos, you’ll find deep feeling on display, and shimmering sentences, and a marvel of a story. How did an asthmatic seven-year-old Jewish-Russian immigrant in a sailor suit become one of the most beloved of contemporary American writers? Not without struggle, both historical and personal, and with a great deal of humor and grit. But mostly through paying close attention: to the way people speak, move, love, and hurt each other. It’s what gives his novels their joyful energy and what makes this memoir, in the opinion of this reader, his finest book yet.”
MARY KARR
bestselling author of Lit and The Liars’ Club:
“Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Unputdownable in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody’s desperate need for a tribe. Readers who’ve fallen for Shteyngart’s antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it’s laden and leavened with a deep, consequential psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date.”
CARL HIASSEN
bestselling author of Bad Monkey:
“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.”
ADAM GOPNIK
bestselling author of The Table Comes First and Paris to the Moon
“I fully expected Gary Shteyngart’s memoir of his search for love and sex in a Russian-Jewish-Queens-Oberlin upbringing to be as hilarious and indecorous and exact as it turns out to be; what I wasn’t entirely prepared for was a book so soulful and pained in its recounting of the feints and false starts and, well, little failures of family love. Portnoy meets Chekhov meets Shteyngart! What could be better?”
NATHAN ENGLANDER
author of What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
“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.”
FRANCINE PROSE, Interview
“Ever wonder how a Russian émigré with a wicked sense of humor becomes a great American novelist? In his new memoir, Gary Shteyngart tells his craziest, funniest, super-saddest tale yet: his own.”
MEG WOLITZER, NPR
“Dazzling . . . The relationship between being funny and serious in books has always been tricky. If you’re too funny, they say you’re not serious. If you’re too serious, you certainly can’t be funny. But Shteyngart’s humor comes out of the most serious material, and vice versa. . . . 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.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”
Los Angeles Times
“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. . . . [Shteyngart] isn’t capable of being anything but engaging, and his erudite, witty and self-mocking voice carries the day.”
The Washington Post
“[A] touching, insightful memoir . . . [Shteyngart] nimbly achieves the noble Nabokovian goal of letting sentiment in without ever becoming sentimental.
The Economist
“Shteyngart possesses a rare trait for a serious novelist: he is funny—and not just knowing-nod, wry-smile funny, but laugh-aloud, drink-no-liquids-while-reading funny. His style of humour is antic and wry, and rests equally on sharp turns of phrase and scarcely credible situations. Underlying his writing, always, is yearning, love and often deep sadness. . . . Little Failure is a deeply moving love letter to Mr. Shteyngart’s life and everything in it: America, Russia, literature, women and his parents.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A memoir this compelling and entertaining—one that frequently collapses the distinction between comedy and tragedy—should expand [Shteyngart’s] readership beyond those who have loved his novels.”
Vanity Fair
“Shteyngart’s achingly honest, bittersweet comic memoir is a winner.”
Library Journal (starred review)
“A surefire hit . . . Poignant, vitriolic, wistful, always moving and painfully honest, this memoir is . . . entertaining and devastating in equal measure.”
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Copies of Little Failure are now available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com.
BookPeople 