Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngart
Gary Shteyngartis an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 July 1972
CountryUnited States of America
relationship
I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.
reading entering consciousness
Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.
writing voice different
I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.
eye blue blue-eyes
You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.
jobs ideas parent
My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.
waiting-rooms bags looks
In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.
safe feels i-can
I feel safe with him because he is so not my ideal and I feel like I can be myself because I'm not in love with him.
writing heart ifs
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
falling-in-love men people
I'm the fortieth ugliest man in this bar. But so what! So what!... Isn't this how people used to fall in love?
girl rocks years
If you read only one memoir by a disaffected, urban, 20-something Jewish girl this year, make it this one. Shukert rocks the lulav.
writing people subway
People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.
hands brain fiction
Good fiction makes me turn off all the other parts of my brain, so that I become quiet and submissive, entirely at the mercy of the work at hand.
moving book way
A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.
writing breathe immigrants
Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.