May 13, 2008 | CUNY Lecture Series, Hunter College
When he moved to the United States from the former Soviet Union in 1976, Gary Shteyngart was 7 years old and did not speak a word of English. Today, with his breakthrough debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” hailed by Esquire magazine as an “acute, accurate, intelligent look at America in the 90s,” the Leningrad native is one of the country’s most exciting new writers. As part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Writers Series, Mr. Shteyngart reads an excerpt from his 2006 work, “Absurdistan,” a satirical account of a Russian-Jewish boy’s journeys through America and Russia, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2006.
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