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2004 Longlist

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

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ABOUT
THE BOOK

Vladimir Girshkin – twenty-five-year-old Russian immigrant, “Little Failure” according to his high-achieving mother, unhappy lover to a fat dungeon mistress Challah (his “little Challah bread”), and lowly clerk at the bureaucratic Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society – is about to have his first break. When the unlikely figure of a wealthy but psychotic old Russian war hero appears and introduces Vladimir to his best friend, who just happens to be a small electric fan, Vladimir has little inkling that he is about to embark on an adventure of unrelenting lunacy – one that overturns his assumptions about what it means to be an immigrant in America.
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook takes us from New York City’s Lower East Side to the hip frontier wilderness of Prava – the Eastern European Paris of the ’90s – whose grand and glorious beauty is marred only by the shadow of the looming statue of Stalin’s foot. There, with the encouragement of the Groundhog, a murderous (but fun-loving) Russian Mafioso, Vladimir infiltrates the American ex-pat community with the hope of defrauding his young middle-class compatriots by launching a pyramid scheme that’s as stupid as it is brilliant. Things go swimmingly at first, but nothing is quite as it seems in Prava, and Vladimir learns that in order to reinvent himself, he must first discover who he really is.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Gary
Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart is the bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and Lake Success. His books have been published in thirty countries.

Gary Shteyngart is the bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and Lake Success. His books have been published in thirty countries.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Country
United States
Original Language
English
Publisher
Riverhead Books

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