Supersize Misha

So what's the Gary Shteyngart story?

Shteyngart's first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, inspired a New York Times Magazine profile, complete with a visit to the author's proud parents weeks in advance of the book's copious raves. These, generously excerpted in the paperback's first eight pages, compare Shteyngart--whose new novel, Absurdistan, captured the full cover of the New York Times Book Review--to Rushdie, Roth (Philip and Henry), Hemingway, Kafka and Henry Miller.

Kiss and kvell: On one hand, this 34-year-old Soviet-born writer is the avatar of a new Jewish-American literature and a poster child for immigrant success. On the other, he's an inveterate Eastern European trickster, opportunistically--or, more likely, compulsively--playing every angle even as he chases the vapors of his lost Leningrad childhood. Or so the flamboyant rogue would have us believe.

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