Word: shteyngart
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...changing of the guard in American fiction, from a generation in which white American-born men still play a primary role (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon) to one in which the principal voices weren't born here, like Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat (born in Haiti), Gary Shteyngart (Russia) and Junot Díaz (the Dominican Republic). They're transnationals, writers for whom displacement and dual cultural citizenship aren't a temporary political accident but the status...
When the acclaimed novelist Gary Shteyngart appeared at the Brattle Theatre for a freewheeling discussion on Monday, the topics ranged from being paid in cheese for his first writing assignment to avoiding the sophomore slump to emigrating from the Soviet Union. He also read from his second novel, “Absurdistan,†which he called “the story of a very large man who destroys a very small country.†In “Absurdistan,†which was named one of the ten best books of the year...
...GARY SHTEYNGART, ABSURDISTAN...
...fact, the novel is getting more user-friendly in general. Fun and profundity are no longer mutually exclusive. Humor is back: Smith and Shteyngart are satirists, Foer and Mitchell are wits. Likewise, vigorous, plotty storytelling is in vogue again. For much of the 20th century the border between high and low fiction was diligently policed. Now there's an attractive trend toward hybridizing high and low, grafting the brilliant verbal intelligence of high literature onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction. "That used to be a real novelty act, or something that was done with kid gloves or with...
...globalized, displaced, deracinated lives. It's a literature of multiplicity and diversity, not one of unanimity, and it makes the idea of a unifying voice of a generation seem rather quaint and 20th century. I may love and empathize with the transplanted Bengalis who populate Lahiri's fiction, or Shteyngart's semi-Americanized Russians, or Foer's uprooted Old Worlders or Smith's international extended families. But I would never be so foolish as to mistake any of them for myself...