Latest news with #GaryShteyngart
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Local bestsellers for the week ended July 13
3. Penguin Press 4. Doubleday 5. Atria Books 6. Gary Shteyngart Random House 7. Ruth Ware Gallery/Scout Press 8. Sarah MacLean Ballantine Books 9. Tor Books 10. Berkley HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Sophie Elmhirst Riverhead Books Advertisement 2. Mel Robbins Hay House LL C Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 3. Scribner 4. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster 5. Penguin Press 6. Random House 7. Pantheon 8. John Green Crash Course Books Advertisement 9. Crown 10. Maybell Eequay Summersdale PAPERBACK FICTION 1. Harper Perennial 2. Ecco 3. Berkley 4. Crown 5. Vintage 6. Andy Weir Ballantine 7. Riverhead Books 8. Random House Trade Paperbacks 9. Crown 10. Emily Henry Berkley PAPERBACK NONFICTION 1. Michael Finkel Vintage 2. Vintage 3. Crown 4. Vintage 5. Knopf 6. Rebecca Solnit Haymarket Books 7. Holt Paperbacks Advertisement 8. Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. Penguin 9. Harper Perennial 10. Griffin Dunne Penguin Books The New England Indie Bestseller List, as brought to you by IndieBound and NEIBA, for the week ended Sunday, July 13, 2025. Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound. For an independent bookstore near you, visit
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, July 20
1. Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Ballantine Books: $30) A story of friendship, love and adversity during the 1980s Space Shuttle program. 2. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart (Random House: $28) A tale of a family struggling to stay together in a country rapidly coming apart. 3. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 9 4. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 5. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 6. Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V. E. Schwab (Tor Books: $30) A vampiric tale follows three women across the centuries. 7. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau: $30) A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence. 8. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 9. The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy by Brigitte Knightley (Ace: $30) A romantasy following an assassin and a healer forced to work together to cure a fatal disease. 10. The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt & Co.: $29) An unexpected wedding guest gets surprise help on her journey to starting anew. … 1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 2. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A study of the barriers to progress in the U.S. 3. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 122 4. A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (Riverhead Books: $28) The true story of a young couple shipwrecked at sea: a partnership stretched to its limits. 5. Lessons From Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Grand Central Publishing: $13) A guide to channeling feline wisdom in the face of authoritarian nonsense. 6. 2024 by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, Isaac Arnsdorf (Penguin Press: $32) The inside story of a tumultuous and consequential presidential campaign. 7. Super Agers by Eric Topol (Simon & Schuster: $33) A detailed guide to a revolution transforming human longevity. 8. The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad (Random House: $30) A guide to the art of journaling and a meditation on the central questions of life. 9. We Can Do Hard Things by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, Amanda Doyle (The Dial Press: $34) The guidebook for being alive. 10. The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Burgoyne (illustrator) (Scribner: $20) On gratitude, reciprocity and community, and the lessons to take from the natural world. … 1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 2. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (Ballantine: $20) 3. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 4. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 5. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 6. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 7. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner: $20) 8. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 9. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22) 10. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley, $20) … 1. The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin: $21) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides (Vintage: $19) 4. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 5. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 6. Sociopath by Patric Gagne, Ph.D. (Simon & Schuster: $20) 7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 9. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 10. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. (Penguin: $19)
New York Times
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?
Gary Shteyngart liked the stick. It was a handsome, polished staff called a shillelagh, used in Ireland for walking and the occasional cudgeling. This one was on sale at the Armoury, a high-end men's clothing shop in TriBeCa that could double as an Ivy League library. 'I'm in love with this thing,' he said of the shillelagh, which was made by Fox Umbrellas of London. President John F. Kennedy, who came to embody Ivy cool, had been a Fox enthusiast. Now, so was Mr. Shteyngart, the bespectacled 53-year-old Russian American novelist. 'This might be my new way of living,' he said. Having recently turned into an unlikely men's style icon with a penchant for crisp martinis, tailored suits and vintage watches, Mr. Shteyngart could credibly entertain the purchase of a $250 stick, even if doing so might make him look like one of the insecure, status-obsessed Manhattanites who populate his novels. The most recent of those, 'Vera, or Faith,' about a precocious Korean American girl growing up in a privileged Manhattan household while the nation descends into an all-too-familiar mix of extremism and indifference, is out now. Mr. Shteyngart had been working on another novel — long and complex, involving spies — when David Ebershoff, Mr. Shteyngart's longtime editor at Random House, invited him to lunch at the restaurant Blue Ribbon in Midtown Manhattan in the fall of 2023. Mr. Ebershoff broke some bad news: Mr. Shteyngart's epic was not working. Mr. Shteyngart, who had been having his own doubts, sat silently for a few moments. 'And then he put his finger up in the air and said, 'I have another idea,'' Mr. Ebershoff recalled. That idea — his new novel, coalesced into a manuscript in just 51 days. 'I've never seen anything like it,' the editor said, praising the author's 'new level of emotional openness.' Mr. Shteyngart's sartorial tastes have also deepened. 'I used to be so against dressing up,' he said, as Daniel Greenwood, the Armoury's director for U.S. sales, outfitted him in an ocean blue City Hunter jacket, made in Hong Kong from Irish linen and selling for $1,000. Born and raised in chilly Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Mr. Shteyngart had transformed into a Mediterranean flâneur, ready to face a New York City afternoon in late spring. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Future Looks Dark, but Familiar, in Gary Shteyngart's New Book
VERA, OR FAITH, by Gary Shteyngart One reason Gary Shteyngart's shtick has worn so well is that he's an insistent self-satirist. A few years after publishing his manic-impressive first novel, 'The Russian Debutante's Handbook' (2002), he lampooned it in 'Absurdistan,' his second. The novel, written by 'Jerry Shteynfarb,' is referred to as 'The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job.' It's not a subtle joke, but people can become fond of artists who are aware enough to stay two beats ahead of their detractors. Shteyngart's new novel, 'Vera, or Faith,' offers us another of his many stand-ins. His name is Igor Shmulkin. He's a writer and magazine editor in Manhattan who might put you in mind of David Remnick — if Remnick were Russian, grievously depressed, flatulent and rumpled, carried hipster satchels and smoked a lot of pot. He's like Shteyngart in that he's a martini super-enthusiast and an online 'manfluencer' in the world of expensive pens, the way Shteyngart is for flashy watches. The best thing about Shmulkin — for the reader, at any rate — is that he's a bookshelf spy and a bookshelf fraud. At other people's homes, he orders his kids to surveil the host's copy of Robert Caro's 'The Power Broker' to see if the spine is broken. Before his own parties, he pays them to rearrange his books so that those by women and people of color are at eye level, to better polish his injustice-righting credentials. We're not allowed to get too close to Shmulkin, perhaps for good reason. This slight, only semi-involving novel is one of Shteyngart's darkest. It offers us a futuristic, dystopian version of America. The unthinkable has become the inevitable. Yet dystopias have become the pre-chewed meat at the end of every novelist's fork. This story is owned instead by Shmulkin's 10-year-old daughter, Vera. She's a handful — bright, anxious, lonely, working to keep her splintering family together. One of her closest companions is a chess simulator, Kaspie, named after her hero, the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
As usual, Gary Shteyngart's new novel arrives right on time
Few novelists risk jumping on the runaway horse of contemporary life as recklessly as Gary Shteyngart. For the fiction writer, stuck at the plodding speed of publishing, such a maneuver requires gauging both political velocity and cultural direction. And yet, book after book, Shteyngart arrives just where — and when — we need him to.
