The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutanteโs Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of Americaโs dysfunctional coming yearsโand the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
In a very near futureโoh, letโs say next Tuesdayโa functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But donโt tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the worldโs last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. 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 shouldnโt it? Lennyโs from a different centuryโhe totally loves books (or โprinted, bound media artifacts,โ as theyโre 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.
After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our โancient dorkโ effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lennyโs new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New Yorkโs Central Park, the cityโs streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. Heโs going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospectโs โhotnessโ and โsustainabilityโ with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.
Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
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On Point - December 30, 2010 On Point - December 6, 2010 PBS News Hour - September 22, 2010 Fresh Air - NPR - August 2, 2010 Studio 360 - July 31, 2010
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