Russian Debutante's Handbook
By Gary Shteyngart
(Riverhead Trade, Paperback, 9781573229883, 496pp.)
Publication Date: May 2, 2006
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Hardcover, Compact Disc
Categories: General
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"Vladimir Girshkin—twenty-five-year-old Russian immigrant, 'Little Failure' according to his high-achieving mother, unhappy lover to fat dungeon mistress Challah (his 'little Challah bread'), and lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society—is about to have his first break. When the unlikely figure of a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears and introduces Vladimir to his best friend, who just happens to be a small electric fan, Vladimir has little inkling that he is about to embark on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy—one that overturns his assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant in America."
The Russian Debutante's Handbook takes us from New York City's Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava—the Eastern European Paris of the '90s—whose grand and glorious beauty is marred only by the shadow of the looming statue of Stalin's foot. There, with the encouragement of the Groundhog, a murderous (but fun-loving) Russian mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the American ex-pat community with the hope of defrauding his young middle-class compatriots by launching a pyramid scheme that's as stupid as it is brilliant. Things go swimmingly at first, but nothing is quite as it seems in Prava, and Vladimir learns that in order to reinvent himself, he must first discover who he really is.
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972, and came to the United States seven years later. His novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was chosen as a best book of the year by the Washington Post Book World and Entertainment Weekly. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. He lives in New York City.
"Rowdy, ribald, funny...this superb debut [is] the real thing."—Esquire
"As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..."—Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post
"A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American."—Harper''s Bazaar
"The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures."—Elle
"If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written."—Time Out New York
"[Gary Shteyngart''s] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." —O. Magazine
This book is on these lists:
Fiction Library by The LadybirdLatest reads by garn2222
Russia by scarlett_begonia
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