Salon.com > Gary Shteyngart

Moby Awards honor best, worst book trailers of 2011

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:45:00 +0000

On the surface, book trailers seem like a fairly ridiculous concept: trying to market literature to people who would rather wait until the movie version comes out. Most of the time, publishing houses create trailers that are visually arresting or entertaining, but have nothing whatsoever to do with the book they're trying to sell. That's where the Moby Awards come in.

Celebrating the best and the worst of book trailers with a statuette of a golden sperm whale, last night's Second Annual Moby Awards were held at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. With categories like "Most Celebtastic Performance," "Best Small House Press Trailer" and "What Are We Doing to Our Children? (good or bad, you decide)," the ceremony is more tongue-in-cheek McSweeney's party than Paris Review gala.

According to Salon's senior book writer and Moby Awards judge Laura Miller, the best book trailer of the year didn't even take home a prize, though it was nominated in the category for best "Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object":

“Super Sad True Love Story”

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:45:00 +0000

In his first two novels, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" and "Absurdistan," Gary Shteyngart sent his gentle, nebbishy heroes (Americanized Russian Jews) on a rough ride through post-Soviet Eastern European wonderlands teeming with gangsters, hustlers and religious fanatics. That madcap, semi-Slavic milieu — with its unstable mixture of sentiment and brutality, fatalism and parvenue initiative — really got his satirical genius percolating. In Shteyngart's third novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," he saves himself the trip, making an Absurdistan of America itself by imagining the near-future disintegration of our nation under a combined load of foreign debt, plutocracy and delusions of personal exceptionalism.

“Absurdistan” author’s A-list book trailer

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:01:00 +0000

Whether book trailers do anything whatsoever to sell books is debatable, but every now and then, one comes along that at least successfully tickles the daylights out of us. Such is the case with "Absurdistan" author Gary Shteyngart's epic promo for his new novel, "Super Sad True Love Story." Boasting an A-list cast of authors, a well-placed cameo from Salon's sexiest man and enough literary in-jokes to make you chortle knowingly into your brandy snifter, the behind-the-scenes look at the man who refers to Oscar Wilde as a "a famous homo" and Chekov as the "guy from Star Trek" is five minutes of pure, hot bookworm delight.

“Absurdistan”

Mon, 01 May 2006 11:13:00 +0000

Post-Soviet life may not need its own Joseph Heller -- and chances are it couldn't sit still long enough to read his books even if it did -- but it has him all the same in Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart's first novel, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook," described the adventures of Vladimir Girshkin, a Russian Jew who was unhappily transplanted to the U.S. in his childhood, as he seeks his fortune (and hides out from mobsters) in the frantically Westernizing Eastern Europe of the 1990s. In Shteyngart's latest, the hilarious, caustic "Absurdistan," another homesick Russian Jew, an obese innocent named Misha Vainberg, pines for a lost paradise. In Misha's case, Eden is the South Bronx, where he once gorged on junk food and canoodled on the stoop with his beloved Rouenna, a homegirl he hooked up with in a titty bar.

“The Russian Debutante’s Handbook” by Gary Shteyngart

Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:49:00 +0000

The experience of the immigrant in America is one of doubled displacement, of feeling torn between two identities and at home in neither one, and if you read much contemporary fiction you've probably seen so many variations on this theme that, unless you happen to belong to the immigrant group in question, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for the latest iteration. But it would be a mistake to write off Gary Shteyngart's rambunctious new novel as one of those solemn tales of wistful dislocation.

For one thing, the immigrant in question, one Vladimir Girshkin -- born in Leningrad and dragged kicking and screaming to the U.S. by his parents during the 1970s when "Jimmy Carter swapped tons of Midwestern grain for tons of Soviet Jews" -- hightails it to Eastern Europe early on in the book. So no moping around the Wal-Mart. For another, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" is a blisteringly funny, almost frighteningly energetic novel of adventure, perfidy and even a car chase or two. So no New Yorkerish moments of quiet epiphany here, either. There's epiphany, all right, but Shteyngart, like his protagonist, is a Russian at heart, and nothing about Vladimir Girshkin, for all his sad-sack ways, is quiet.