Mi chiamavano Piccolo Fallimento

I. Loved. This. Book. I loved this book so much that I finished it more than a week ago and I am still mulling it over. How can I write a review of a memoir so funny and brilliant and insightful and emotional and just plain good ? My review will never be able to explain everything I admired in Shteyng Leggi tutto

Not my cup of borscht..won this in a Goodreads giveaway for (I hope) an honest review.Gary is a decent writer but it behooves no one to write a biography under the age of 40,particularly one as angst-ridden,juvenile,navel-gazing, and transparently attention-seeking as this.Who will like this book: y Leggi tutto

Thanks to Random House for sending me an advance copy. I've read some preliminary reviews on here dismissive of the writer's young age. "How could someone this young write their life story?" After reading this, I have to ask, how could one not? This memoir was filled with the kind of freedom, braver Leggi tutto

While reading the book I started writing the review as the memories of a young immigrant unfolded on the pages. I thought it was excellent, experienced, eloquent writing, gracing the valuable hours I spent reading it. Many hours it turned out to be, for I constantly fell asleep, due to the fact that Leggi tutto

(4.5) If, like I have, you’ve enjoyed both fiction and nonfiction by Jonathan Safran Foer and Shalom Auslander (whose Hope: A Tragedy was one of my 2012 favorites), you should love this self-deprecating family memoir from the Russian-born (real name: Igor) American novelist. (Oh the irony that h

Decades too early, this memoir is about the reconciliation of a writer with his immigrant past-- a full-on "acceptance." I loathed the main character to a certain point-- he is trying desperately to "fit in"... an exercise I myself find totally useless (when in doubt, freak 'em out!). But dangnabbit Leggi tutto

This was my mother's review of this book, and I don't think I could've said it any better than her: "I have never encountered a family which I found more unappealing. The whole bunch. Gary did his best to portray his family as typical Russian, Jewish immigrants and then tried to justify their booris Leggi tutto

By age 40 George Orwell has been a colonial policeman in Burma, a hop picker in England, a patient in a Parisian charity hospital, and a volunteer fighter in the Spanish Civil War. Kurt Vonnegut has been a soldier, a POW, and a father of three who also adopted three of his dead sister's children. Pa Leggi tutto

If it’s true that every one of us is a book just waiting to be written, then it’s particularly so for Gary Shteyngart. His memoir, Little Failure, should be taught as an example of how memoirs should be written. It’s courageous, poignant, often bitingly funny, entertaining and achingly real. There’s Leggi tutto

Another uneven maddening crazy brilliant Shteyngart book, this time a memoir. The tale begins in early childhood in Leningrad, follows the family's emigration to New York, his attendance at an orthodox Jewish school and attempts to Americanize himself, the shock of entering the highly competitive St Leggi tutto