Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, …gloom and doom. Some of us
have spent a whole term brooding over Anna Karenina and The Brothers
Karamazov. Not a laugh for 14 weeks! It’s time to get some laughs from a Russian,
turned American, writer. ‘Seriously’,
because Shteyngart has won, or almost won, numerous awards: The Russian Debutante's Handbook won the
Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction
Award and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book
and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. In 2002, he
was named one of the five best new writers by Shout NY Magazine. Absurdistan was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine, as well as a book of the year by the Washington
Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and many
other publications. In June 2010, Shteyngart was named as one of The New
Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" luminary fiction
writers. Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. His memoir Little Failure was a
finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award (Autobiography)
In this SDG
our purpose will be to enjoy and laugh, for now. And later, we will be able
to tell our grandchildren, when they join PLATO, that we were in the first PLATO
group to discover the greatest classic Russian/American writer of the 21st
century.
Week one: The Russian
Debutante’s Handbook, first half
Week Two: The Russian
Debutants’s Handbook, second half
Week Three:
Absurdistan, first half
Week Four:
Absurdistan , second half
Week Five: Super Sad
True Love Story, first half
Week Six: Super Sad
True Love Story, second half
Week Seven: Lake Success, first half
Week Eight: Lake
Success, second half
Week Nine: Little Failure: A Memoir
Week Ten: Articles: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/10/from-the-diaries-of-pussy-cake,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/05/o-k-glass
and https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of-a-watch-geek