Reviews
"This is one of the funniest and most frightening books I've ever read. It pictures a New York dystopia that is scary because it's already happening. I never really believed in the horrors of1984, but the details ofSuper Sad True Love Storyare all too convincing. Gary Shteyngart is our greatest satirist, but he also knows how to write about love and vulnerability in a way to make the angels (and ordinary mortals) weep."-Edmund White "The sweet but hapless Lenny Abramov and the beautiful Eunice Park are the Romeo and Juliet of our wobbly age.Super Sad True Love Storyis a terrifying and heartbreaking, yet exhilarating and hilarious vision of where our post-literate, post-solvent civilization is headed."-Kiran Desai, author ofThe Inheritance of Loss "If there is any serious reader out there who has not yet made the acquaintance of the seriously absurd universe of Gary Shteyngart then she would be well advised to get on it. With roots deep in the heart of Russian literature, Shteyngart has become an indispensable and important American writer.Super Sad True Love Storyshows him at his soulful, smart and hilarious best."-Jay McInerney "Super Sad True Love Storyis an intoxicating brew of keen-edged satire, social prophecy, linguistic exuberance, and emotional wallop. The American novel is safe in Gary Shteyngart's gifted hands."-David Mitchell "Gary Shteyngart has written an ingenious satire with enough reality to be truly frightening, super funny and super sad."-Mary Gaitskill, “Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, Super Sad True Love Story , is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance - a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts&but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings. Mr. Shteyngart spent his earliest childhood in Leningrad, then moved with his family to the United States, and “Super Sad� reflects his dual heritage, combining the dark soulfulness of Russian literature with the antic inventiveness of postmodern American writing; the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie&It demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation’s most original and exhilarating writers&In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his antic, supercaffeinated prose, Mr. Shteyngart gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet - a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story.� - Michiko Kakutani , New York Times “Gary Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story , had to be a total blast to write. It’s an homage to science fiction, George Orwell’s 1984 in particular, with a satirical postmodern overlay of authorial wish fulfillment&.The text consists of Lenny’s diary entries and Eunice’s e-mails to various friends and family. They both write with endearing, sometimes clumsy earnestness, and their intertwining narratives, for all the book’s cheeky darkness, pose a superserious question: Can love and language save the world?� -Elle “Shteyngart makes trenchant, often hilarious, observations about a fading empire.� - O Magazine “With Shteyngart’s nutty knack for tangy language, it’s as if Vladimir Nabokov rewrote 1984 .� -People “It’s not easy to summarize Shteyngart; there’s so much satirical gunpowder packed into every sentence that the effect gets lost in the short version. But basically, this is a love story [that is] ridiculously witty and painfully prescient, but more than either of those, it’s romantic.� - Time (summer preview) “Finally, a funny book about the financial crisis.� -Wall Street Journal “[A] smart send-up of our info-overload age& Love Story is funny, on-target, and ultimately sad as it captures the absurdity and anxiety of navigating an increasingly out-of-control world.� -Entertainment Weekly “Exuberant and devastating& such an acidly funny, prescient book& It’s a wildly funny book that hums with the sheer vibrancy of Shteyngart’s prose, and that holds up a riotous, terrifying mirror to a corrupted American empire in decline.� -San Francisco Chronicle “The satirist author of Absurdistan rewrites 1984 as a black comedy set in a near future where everything scary about multinational banks, media super-saturation, and American cultural devolution is amped up to 11 (and really funny).� -Details “It’s a love story, and as super-sad as the title promises&Shteyngart is the, "Gary Shteyngart's wonderful new novel,Super Sad True Love Story, is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance - a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts…but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It's a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings. Mr. Shteyngart spent his earliest childhood in Leningrad, then moved with his family to the United States, and "Super Sad" reflects his dual heritage, combining the dark soulfulness of Russian literature with the antic inventiveness of postmodern American writing; the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie…It demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers…In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his antic, supercaffeinated prose, Mr. Shteyngart gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet - a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story." -Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Gary Shteyngart's third novel,Super Sad True Love Story, had to be a total blast to write. It's an homage to science fiction, George Orwell's1984in particular, with a satirical postmodern overlay of authorial wish fulfillment….The text consists of Lenny's diary entries and Eunice's e-mails to various friends and family. They both write with endearing, sometimes clumsy earnestness, and their intertwining narratives, for all the book's cheeky darkness, pose a superserious question: Can love and language save the world?" -Elle "Shteyngart makes trenchant, often hilarious, observations about a fading empire." -O Magazine "It's not easy to summarize Shteyngart; there's so much satirical gunpowder packed into every sentence that the effect gets lost in the short version. But basically, this is a love story [that is] ridiculously witty and painfully prescient, but more than either of those, it's romantic." -Time(summer preview) "Finally, a funny book about the financial crisis." -Wall Street Journal "[A] smart send-up of our info-overload age… Love Storyis funny, on-target, and ultimately sad as it captures the absurdity and anxiety of navigating an increasingly out-of-control world." -Entertainment Weekly "Exuberant and devastating… such an acidly funny, prescient book… It's a wildly funny book that hums with the sheer vibrancy of Shteyngart's prose, and that holds up a riotous, terrifying mirror to a corrupted American empire in decline." -San Francisco Chronicle "The satirist author of Absurdistan rewrites 1984 as a black comedy set in a near future where everything scary about multinational banks, media super-saturation, and American cultural devolution is amped up to 11 (and really funny)." -Details "It's a love story, and as super-sad as the title promises…Shteyngart is the Joseph Heller of the information age…That's the difference between Shteyngart and the average literary satirist (or even an above-average o
