In My Godless Household, Poems Were The

I Get So Lonely Sometimes, I Could Put A Box On My Head And Mail Myself To A Stranger.

Gary Shteyngart Has Written A Memoir For The Ages. I Spat Laughter On The First Page And Closed The Last With Wet Eyes. Un-put-down-able In The Day And A Half I Spent Reading It, Little Failure Is A Window Into Immigrant Agony And Ambition, Jewish Angst, And Anybody's Desperate Need For A Tribe. Readers Who've Fallen For Shteyngart's Antics On The Page Will Relish The Trademark Humor. But Here It's Laden And Leavened With A Deep, Consequential, Psychological Journey. Brave And Unflinching, Little Failure Is His Best Book To Date

I Was 40 Years Old Before I Became An Overnight Success, And I'd Been Publishing For 20 Years.

The Lesson You've Got To Learn Is The Someday You'll Someday Stagger To, Blinking In Cold Light, All Tears Shed, Ready To Poke Your Bovine Head In The Yoke They've Shaped. Everyone Learns This. Born, Everyone Breathes, Pays Tax, Plants Dead And Hurts Galore. There's Grief Enough For Each. My Mother Learned By Moving Man To Man, Outlived Them All. The Parched Earth's Bare (once She Leaves It) Of Any Who Watched The Instants I Trod It. Other Than Myself, Of Course. I've Made A Study Of Bearing And Forbearance. Everyone Does, It Turns Out, And Note Those Faces Passing By: Not One's A God.

We Are In The Grip Of Some Big Machine Grinding Us Along. The Force Of It Simplifies Everything. A Weird Calm Settled Over Me From Inside Out. What Is About To Happen Has Stood In Line To Happen. All The Roads Out Of That Instant Have Been Closed, One By One.