Matt Thorne

Snack Daddy

Absurdistan

By

Granta Books 352pp £10.99 order from our bookshop

Leningrad-born Gary Shteyngart came to America aged seven and now lives in New York. The cultural differences between Russia and America are the main source of humour in Absurdistan, Shteyngart’s second novel. For Misha Vainburg, New York represents all that is great in the world, a heaven to which he cannot return because his gangster father has killed an Oklahoma businessman named Roger Daltrey (no relation to the frontman of The Who, although the name is used as a source of humour).

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • In this month's Silenced Voices, Lucy Popescu shines a light on Myanmar's persecution of writers and journalists, p… ,
    • Lecture on war and peace in 19th-century Europe by Professor Sir Richard Evans, Thurs 25 Oct, 6.30pm Europe House… ,
    • 'Why, throughout the world, are so many people fascinated by the fiction and reality of espionage? And why of all p… ,
    • . here on books, Muriel Spark and life's tangled dance ,
    • RT : There aren't enough aggressive subtitles these days: ,
    • Churchill's on the cover of the October edition of the magazine. Piers Brendon reviews two new books about the Brit… ,
    • 'Readers have no more power to predict where the next story is going to take them than the prisoners had to determi… ,
    Follow Us