Who

Shteyngart is an author and satirist who rose to prominence with The Russian Debutante's Handbook.

Backstory

Born in Leningrad, Shteyngart immigrated to Queens at age seven but, he says, it took him several years to learn proper English. He spent eight years at Hebrew school—where he claims to have had some of the worst experiences of his life, hence his avowed secularism—before studying politics at Oberlin and writing his senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. In 2003, he published The Russian Debutante's Handbook, the semi-autobiographical adventures of a 25-year-old second-generation Russian immigrant. Shteyngart followed up three years later with Absurdistan, a book-length "love letter and also a plea" for American citizenship from a 325-pound, 30-year-old Russian heir. Shteyngart is a regular contributor to Travel and Leisure, where he has written about Azerbaijan, St. Petersburg, and Salvador in northeastern Brazil.

Of note

The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and became a bestseller, while Absurdistan was named one of the top 10 books of 2006 by the New York Times. Both novels are exuberant satires, lampooning and caricaturing everything under the sun: American ex-pats, rap culture, oil-rich Soviets, Jewish conspiracies, ethnic conflicts. Shteyngart's third novel—he's to be published again by Dan Menaker at Random House—will be set in Albany in 2040, when the town has become "a small religious protectorate under the command of a Korean Rev. Cho."

Personal

The perennially goateed Shteyngart, who says he sees his analyst four times a week, lives on the Lower East Side. (He writes his novels in bed). He says New York City is "the one place in the country where I feel loved and coddled and safe."

Soundbite

Shteyngart says he finds today's literary scene a little too clean. "It's so hard to be a writer these days. It's so antiseptic. We're this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit. There are so few people to drink with."

No joke

It's likely Shteyngart is the only author ever to appear on a book jacket with a bear cub on a leash.