Little Failure: A Memoir
by Gary Shteyngart
- Used
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- See description
- ISBN 10
- 0679643753
- ISBN 13
- 9780679643753
- Seller
-
Camarillo, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Book appears to be untouched/unread. Spine and binding is tight.
Dust jacket is in mint condition and protected with Mylar.
Signed by the author, Gary Shteyngart, on title page.
After three acclaimed novels—The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story—Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.
Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor decided to become a writer, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page he produced. He wrote Lenin and His Magical Goose, his first novel.
In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor's life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange tankers of grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.
Shteyngart's loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a "conscientious toiler" on Wall Street, 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.
As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being.
Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald's hamburger.
Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart's prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.
Synopsis
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He is the author of the novels Super Sad True Love Story , which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world; Absurdistan , which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker , Esquire , GQ , Travel + Leisure , The New York Times Magazine , and many other publications and has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Casa Pacifica (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 122
- Title
- Little Failure: A Memoir
- Author
- Gary Shteyngart
- Format/Binding
- As New
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10
- 0679643753
- ISBN 13
- 9780679643753
- Publisher
- Random House Publishing Group
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2014-01-07
- Pages
- 368
- Bookseller catalogs
- Biography; Non Fiction;
Terms of Sale
Casa Pacifica
About the Seller
Casa Pacifica
About Casa Pacifica
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Title Page
- A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....