Description

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.