18 Facts About Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart ' is a Soviet-born American writer.

Gary Shteyngart is the author of five novels and a memoir.

Gary Shteyngart comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as "typically Soviet".

Gary Shteyngart's father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist.

Gary Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York, with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language.

Gary Shteyngart spoke with a Russian accent until he was around 14.

Gary Shteyngart is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, in 1995, with a senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan.

Gary Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s, and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.

Gary Shteyngart earned an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Gary Shteyngart had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for Fall 2007.

Gary Shteyngart has taught writing at Hunter College, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

In June 2010, Gary Shteyngart was named as one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction writers.

Gary Shteyngart's memoir Little Failure was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Gary Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook, and Absurdistan.

Gary Shteyngart's other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, The New York Times, and The Atlantic.

Gary Shteyngart has become known for his prolific blurbing, which has inspired a Tumblr website devoted to his Collected Blurbs, a live reading, and a fifteen-minute documentary narrated by Jonathan Ames.

Gary Shteyngart is married to Esther Won, who is of Korean descent.

Gary Shteyngart spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.