The Russian Debutante's Handbook: A Novel - Softcover

"As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..."--Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post

"A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American."--Harper's Bazaar

"The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures."--Elle

"If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written."--Time Out New York

"[Gary Shteyngart's] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." --O. Magazine