Gary Shteyngart

Description

Gary Shteyngart (born 1972) is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR (he alternately calls it "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg"). Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times.<p>Shteyngart spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia; the city was then known as Leningrad. He describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a Lomo camera factory; his mother was a pianist. Shteyngart emigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up with no television in the apartment he lived in and no spoken English. He did not shed his thick Russian accent until the age of 14.<p>After being forbidden to return to Russia, a trip to Prague helped spawn his first novel, set in the fictitious European city of Prava. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, Oberlin College in