Author of the week: Gary Shteyngart

last updated 8 January 2015

Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart didn’t always recognize his background as a creative asset, said Alden Mudge in BookPage.com. The author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story has made his name by satirizing the Russian immigrant experience, but as a child, he desperately wanted to be an average American. When he was 7, he and his parents were “grain Jews”—members of the Jewish community who were allowed to leave the Soviet Union in trades for American wheat. Landing in Queens, N.Y., Shteyngart worked hard to fit in, managing to shed his Russian accent by 14. “I practiced in the mirror like crazy,” he says, though he admits he learned a bit too much from the prime-time soap opera Dallas. “When I got a TV, I got a Texan accent.”

His schoolmates were easier to impress than his parents, said Hannah Levintova in Mother Jones. Though Shteyngart’s sense of humor won him friends (his Torah parody became the hit of his Hebrew school), his parents made no secret of their disappointment with his schoolwork. His mother nicknamed him “Little Failure”—a phrase he’s chosen as the title of his new memoir. Even as a best-selling author, Shteyngart has found it hard to measure up to his parents’ standards: Once, they berated him for coming in just 30th on a magazine’s list of the best New York writers. “Some of my best friends are Korean or Indian immigrants, and it’s the same kind of situation,” he says. “‘You’re the third best doctor in the New York metropolitan area? Why aren’t you the best?’”