Ten years ago I interviewed Gary Shteyngart for a profile in Zeek.. At the time his hair was brown and mine covered my head. In the time since then he has continued to put out books at a steady rate of one every three or four years, though “Little Failure” in 2014, was a comic…
Ten years ago I interviewed Gary Shteyngart for a profile in Zeek. At the time his hair was brown and mine covered my head. In the time since then he has continued to put out books at a steady rate of one every three or four years. His earlier novels (“Absurdistan” and “The Russian Debutante’s…
Gary Shtyengart’s new book, “Lake Success,” his first novel in seven years, follows Barry Cohen, a hedge-fund trader under investigation from the SEC, as he bails on his marriage and his autistic toddler son in favor of a Greyhound bus ride in search of the “real America.” It’s a midlife crisis road-trip novel set in…
Gary Shteyngart was writing about Trump all along, and we didn’t know it. Consider the contents of his novels: Russian oligarchs undermining foreign governments for obscure reasons; the rotund failsons of the mega-rich, their gross bodies engorged on unimaginable luxury; the blurring borders between politics and multi-level marketing; and, despite ever-increasing inequality and the threat…
Lake Success: A Novel Gary Shteyngart Random House, 352 pages, $28 Barry Cohen is a hero for our time. The protagonist of Gary Shteyngart’s fourth novel, “Lake Success,” he is master of the universe, or at least of Wall Street, although really, he is waiting for the other shoe to drop. It is 2016, and…
On Friday, January 27, one week after he was sworn in as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” That order — as you’ve now surely heard — did at least two notable things. First, it suspended the “Issuance of Visas and Other…
Emblazoned in handwritten Cyrillic on Olga Tomchin’s back is a word that has come to embody so much more than its literal definition. Pozor, Russian for “disgrace” (or shanda in Yiddish) has become a rallying cry for a movement of Soviet-born millennials defying their families’ ideologies and banding together in opposition to Donald Trump. Like…
This exclusive interview took place the morning of February 3 at the gracious hacienda of Fidel Castro just outside Havana, overlooking the ocean. The idea was initiated by Castro through a signed letter hand-delivered to the offices of the Backward by an officer of the Cuban army. “In the spirit of friendship and brotherhood, I…
אַבֿרהם שוואַרץ איז געפאָרן אַהין מיט דרײַ חדשים צוריק, נישט וויסנדיק אַז אין גיכן וועט צווישן איראַן און ישׂראל אויסברעכן אַ מלחמה.
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