Lake Success

(Paperback)

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Description

A riotous, satirical road trip through Trump's America from the author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a second chance at life... Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with a deep emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now, while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.

Reviews

Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. The wit and the immigrant's sense of heartbreak just seem to pour from him * The New York Times *
Uproariously funny, bitingly satiric, yet also warm and big-hearted * Boston Globe *
SPECTACULAR... More than just an artistic tour de force, Lake Success succeeds in saying something big about America today. By turns compassionate and mournful, wickedly satirical and ultimately aspirational. He captures what Philip Roth once called the 'indigenous American berserk' * NPR/Fresh Air *
A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced * Washington Post *

Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly; its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity

-- Richard Ford
An unforgettable road trip through an America that's ominously divided, wildly diverse, and weirdly familiar. Gary Shteyngart writes with brutal honesty, virtuoso wit, and stubborn compassion for his deeply flawed but still somehow lovable characters -- Tom Perrotta, bestselling author of 'The Leftovers'
The funniest book you'll read all year. A rollicking and zinger-filled road trip [and] a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. Epic, melancholy, staggeringly beautiful -- Maria Semple, author of 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette'
A trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little, to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times -- Nathan Hill, author of 'The Nix'
A novel reflecting with perfect comedy and horrible tragedy exactly what America feels like right this minute. I barked with laughter, at the same time as wincing in pain. Shteyngart has held up a mirror to American culture that is so accurate and so devastating... Stupendous -- Elizabeth Gilbert
Lake Success is a genial and warm-hearted book...a virtuoso piece of work, full of brilliant noticings...an unhysterical novel about a hysterical country at a hysterical time - the work of a novelist who believes in the power of fiction to illuminate out shared world. * Literary Review *
Shteyngart does slapstick as well as ever, but he stakes out new terrain in the expert way he develops his characters' pathos.... A stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort * Publisher's Weekly *
The satirical layering is masterful. Dark - so dark - yet delicious. * Esquire *
Lake Success is undeniably enjoyable, rattling along with good jokes and sharp set pieces, and shot through with Shteyngart's good-natured melancholy. * The Times *
Referencing classic novels like The Great Gatsby and On the Road, Shteyngart whips up a novel that's part-satire and part-comedy of manners, humanising the super-rich while casting a critical eye over their world. It's funny, cutting, but above all compassionate * The Herald Magazine *
Shteyngart's comic energy is well deployed on the ridiculously rich, especially amid Trump's campaign and his election by, perhaps, many Greyhound riders. * Daily Mail *

Author Bio

Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, The Russian Debutante's Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction) and Lake Success. His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.