Little Failure: A memoir - Hardcover

If you liked A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Everything is Illuminated, you'll love Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure.

Gary Shteyngart's loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer, or at least an accountant, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka-'Little Failure'-which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.

A candid and deeply poignant story of a Soviet family's trials and tribulations, and of their escape in 1979 to the consumerist promised land of the USA, Little Failure is also an exceptionally funny account of the author's transformation from asthmatic toddler in Leningrad to 40-something Manhattanite with a receding hairline and a memoir to write.

'Kicks ass - more fantastic, more unbelievable than his novels' Mary Karr, author of The
Liars' Club

'A marvel of a story. His finest book yet' Zadie Smith

'Little Failure is a delight' Aravid Adiga

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972. In 2007 he was named one of Granta's Best Young American novelists. His debut The Russian Debutante's Handbook was widely acclaimed (and won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), as were his second, Absurdistan (one of the 10 Best Books of the Year in the New York Times) and Super Sad True Love Story. He writes regularly for the New Yorker.