Gary Shteyngart (He/Him)
Brigitte LacombeGary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook," won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. "Absurdistan" was acclaimed as one of The New York Times' 10 best books of the year in 2006. His memoir, "Little Failure," was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is "Vera, or Faith." He lives in New York with his wife and son.
Visit website | 
Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
Books:
Vera, or Faith
A Novel
Fiction / Literature
Random House
July 2025
ISBN 9780593595091
Hardcover, 256 pages
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds.
There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half Jewish, half Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school, to keep Daddy and Anne Mom together, and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
Both biting and deeply moving, "Vera, or Faith" is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to "What Maisie Knew," Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, "Vera, or Faith" demonstrates why Gary Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers." More/less
Our Country Friends
A Novel
Fiction / Literature
Random House Publishing Group
September 2022
ISBN 9781984855145
Trade Paperback, 336 pages
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic.
Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
Both elegiac and very, very funny, "Our Country Friends" is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller "Super Sad True Love Story." More/less
