Immigrant Song
Gary Shteyngart’s memoir lays out the surprising inspirations behind his comic muse
Kate Christensen
Little Failure:
A Memoir
by Gary Shteyngart
Random House
$27.00 List Price
The germ of Gary Shteyngart’s honest, poignant, hilarious new memoir, Little Failure, was planted in 1996, when he was a recent college graduate, living in Manhattan with “a ponytail, a small substance-abuse problem, and a hemp pin on his cardboard tie,” his novelist dreams still out in front of him. Browsing at the Strand Annex during his office-job lunch hour, he came across an enormous coffee-table book called St.
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