Gary Shteyngart

A dark tale of America's dysfunctional coming years, and of the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.

"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American...

"When his dream of the perfect marriage, the perfect son, and the perfect life implodes, a Wall Street millionaire takes a cross-country bus trip in search of his college sweetheart and ideals of youth. Myopic, narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his 3 year-old-son's diagnosis of...

This work presents twenty-three "essays brimming with insight and emotional truth. From a writer turning to an AI language enerator to write about her sister's death, to a son grappling with the memory of his abusive mother, to a pilgrim walking in the shadow of a missing woman, these selections interrogate the past and illuminate the present." --back cover