Gary Shteyngart’s cozy, dystopian, soap-operatic immigrant COVID paradise

Author Gary Shteyngart near his country home, the inspiration — along with COVID — for the great American satirist’s latest novel, “Our Country Friends.” On the Shelf Our Country Friends By Gary Shteyngart Random House: 336 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. The fall leaves were turning, the sweater weather brisk, and I was waiting for Gary Shteyngart in front of a popular restaurant in Hudson, N.Y., to talk about his new book, “Our Country Friends.” The novel features a Shteyngart-esque writer, Sasha Senderovsky, his family and friends, a famous Actor, a Hudson Valley compound and, last but not least, the pandemic. Which is the ultimate immigrant thing.” Books Gary Shteyngart laughs away life’s ‘Little Failure’ Russian-born American writer Gary Shteyngart delivers the memoir ‘Little Failure,’ in which a would-be maudlin childhood becomes an ecstatic depiction of survival, guilt and perseverance. They’re like, ‘I wanted this, but I became that.’” Braced by the cocktail, I asked Shteyngart a question I’ve never asked an author before: “So … how’s your penis?” In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Shteyngart wrote about the ordeal of having a botched circumcision at age 7 after his family moved to America.