Book Reviews
Of the many enormously gifted authors now writing about the immigrant experience…Gary Shteyngart is undoubtedly the funniest…[His] evocative new memoir…is as entertaining as it's moving…he poignantly conveys his parents' hard-fought efforts to make new lives for themselves in America, while using humor to chronicle his own difficulties in trying to bridge the dislocations of two cultures…the closing chapter, recounting a 2011 return trip with his parents to Russia, provides a fitting end to this keenly observed tale of exile, coming-of-age and family love: It's raw, comic and deeply affecting, a testament to Mr. Shteyngart's abilities to write with both self-mocking humor and introspective wisdom, sharp-edged sarcasm and aching—and yes, Chekhovian—tenderness
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[H]ilarious and moving…Little Failure is so packed with humor, it's easy to overlook the rage, but it's there, and it's part of what makes the book so compelling…Thanks to Little Failure, the army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.
Andy Borowitz - New York Times Book Review
Little Failure...puts the lure in failure.
Wall Street Journal
An ecstatic depiction of survival, guilt and perseverance.... Russia gave birth to that master of English-language prose named Vladimir Nabokov. Half a century later, another writer who grew up with Cyrillic characters is gleefully writing American English as vivid, original and funny as any that contemporary U.S. literature has to offer.
Los Angeles Times
Surely some enterprising scholar is already gnawing at the question of why two of the brilliant outliers of American writing were Russian immigrants. One, of course, was the great Vladimir Nabokov. The other is the youngish Shteyngart. They both have the qualities of sly humor, secret griefs.
San Francisco Chronicle
What a beautiful mess!... [Shteyngart has] not just his own distinct identity, but all the loose ends and unresolved contradictions out of which great literature is made.
Charles Simic - New York Review of Books
The tragic story of what makes a great comic writer.
Lev Grossman - Time
Hilarious . . . an affectionate take on growing up in gray Leningrad and Technicolor Queens.
People
Shteyngart is a great writer—there’s no arguing his literary merit—but he’s also very, very funny, which is a rare quality in literature these days.
GQ
Literary gold...[a] bruisingly funny memoir.
Vogue
Funny, unflinching, and, title notwithstanding, a giant success.... The innate humor of Shteyngart’s storytelling is dotted with touching sadness, all of it amounting to an engrossing look at his distinct, multilayered Gary-ness.
Entertainment Weekly
Shteyngart possesses a rare trait for a serious novelist: he is funny—and not just knowing-nod, wry-smile funny, but laugh-aloud, drink-no-liquids-while-reading funny.
Economist
Moving....and laugh-out-loud funny.
USA Today
(Starred review.) In his typical laugh-aloud approach, the acclaimed novelist carries us with him on his journey, from his birth in Leningrad and his decision to become a writer at age five to his immigration to America and his family's settling in New York City in 1979.... Shteyngart's self-deprecating humor contains the sharp-edged twist of the knife of melancholy in this take of a young man "desperately trying to have a history, a past."
Publishers Weekly
Honest, poignant, hilarious.... Shteyngart's stalwart refusal to cast himself as a victim sets this book apart from the majority of American memoirs, whose authors seem hell-bent on passing judgement on the people who raised them.... Shteyngart seems to have made a deal with some minor devil (a daredevil?) stipulating that if he exposed every crack and fissure in himself, laid bare every misstep, fuckup, and psychic flaw, his memoir would be a deep and original book. If so, the payoff here was absolutely worth it. —Kate Christensen
Bookforum
(Starred review.) An immigrant's memoir like few others, with as sharp an edge and as much stylistic audacity as the author's well-received novels.... Shteyngart traces his family history from the atrocities suffered in Stalinist Russia, through his difficulties assimilating as the "Red Nerd" of schoolboy America.... [A] memoir [that's] compelling and entertaining—one that frequently collapses the distinction between comedy and tragedy.
Kirkus Reviews