Gary Shteyngart
[5] Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York,[6] with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language.[7] He is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School[8] in New York City, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, in 1995,[9] with a senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan.[6][10] Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s,[11] and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.[16] Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.[19][20] Thirty-five years after he emigrated to the U.S., in January, 2014, Random House published Little Failure: A Memoir,[21] and promoted it by a film trailer with James Franco and Rashida Jones.