Lunch with Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart

The New York Times best-selling author, Gary Shteyngart, returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.  Lake Success is the funniest book you’ll read all year.  But the surprise here is the novel’s epic sweep, its melancholy resonance.  What begins as a rollicking and zinger-filled road trip sneakily deepens into a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. 

Mr. Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He has won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications, and has been translated into twenty-six languages.

Lake Success

Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema—a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth—has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration of the 0.1 Percent, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to what really makes America great.

*** Registration closes September 21, 2018. ***

Publisher: Random House

Photo credit:  GaryShteyngart.com