Super Sad True Love Story

In a very near future, a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don't tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, proud author of what may well be the world's last diary. Despite his job at an outfit called 'Post-Human Services', which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn't it? Lenny's from a different century. He TOTALLY loves books (or 'printed, bound media artifacts' as they're now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean-American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in 'Images' and a minor in 'Assertiveness'. When riots break out in New York's Central Park, the city's streets are lined with National Guard tanks and patient Chinese creditors look ready to foreclose on the whole mess, Lenny vows to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, there is still value in being a real human being.

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and moved to the United States with his family seven years later. His first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book, a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and a Best Debut of the Year by the Guardian. His second novel, Absurdistan, has sold over 40,000 copies in the UK. The New York Times Book Review named it one of 'The Top 10 Books of 2006'. His most recent novel Super Sad True Love Story was published by Granta in 2010. It won the Salon Book Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Bestseller, and was the first book by an American author to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. Gary's fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine. In 2010 he was selected as one of the New Yorker's '20 under 40'. He lives in Manhattan with his Dachshund.