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Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel |  | Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $8.00
as of 9/9/2010 10:22 EDT details
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Seller: George and CO. Sellers
Rating:  reviews
Sales Rank: 154
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400066409
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781400066407
ASIN: 1400066409
Publication Date: July 27, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: Welcome to the day after tomorrow. In Gary Shteyngart's near-future New York, the dollar has been pegged to the yuan, the American Restoration Authority is on high security alert, and Lenny Abramov, the middle-aged possessor of a decent credit score but an absurdly low--and embarrassingly public--Male Hotness rating, is in love with the young Eunice Park. Like many of the clients of his employer, the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, he'd also like to live forever, but all he really wants is to love Eunice. And for a time, despite the traditional challenges of their gaps in age and ethnicity and the more modern hurdle of an oppressively networked culture that makes your most private identity as transparent as the Onionskin jeans that are all the rage, he does. Super Sad True Love Story is as corrosively hilarious as you'd expect from the satirist of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, but what may surprise you are the moments when the satire hits bedrock and the story becomes--no air quotes required--sad, true, and very much a love story. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.
After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.
Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Paranoia Inducing Pleasure September 9, 2010
Ramsay Stevens (New York, NY)
If Dostoevsky were alive today and writing about the world we live in, he wouldn't be able to produce a book as fun and as cringe inducing as Super Sad True Love Story. Shytengart has solidified his place as our generations heir to the throne of the russian literary prophet. The only problem is that without the comfortable perch of posterity that makes a dive into Dostoevsky's 19th Century Russia an enjoyable excursion for all, Super Sad True Love Story is an anxious adventure through our very own world. Reading Super Sad True True Love Story in 21st Century America is as close to feeling what a Soviet reader of Orwell's 1984 must have felt as I would like to get.
In short, a must buy for anyone seeking philosophical insight into their world through the lens of contemporary literature.
Frankie says....this is what you get when all you care about is money and sex September 8, 2010
Luigi Facotti (Chicago Il)
Gary Shteyngart's new book operates at many levels - a flippant and biting satire on social mores in the US that echo the decline and fall of Soviet Russia - a parable of where the decadence emanating from Washington and Wall Street is taking us - the love story of Lenny and Eunice- America as a helpless and complicit satellite of Capitalist China - the evolution of the iPhone to the ubiquitous apparati - female genital displays via transparent jeans- pre teen pornogrpahy - the search for endless youth. Frankie Goes to Hollywood meet the Vampire Squids of Wall Street meets Larry Flynt - meets a disconnected government obsequious to emerging world powers - meets unappreciated veterans from a futile war in Venezuela - meets Low and High Net Worth Individuals. All too possible and woven effortlessly together by the convincing magic of Mr. Shteyngart's pen. I was amazed at the mention of the obscure BBC cult movie "Threads" and how he summed up the narcissistic You Tube generation with Eunice's comment "I've never really learned how to read texts ....just to scan them for information". As Mr. Shteyngart continues to build as an important writer for the 21st century it is to be hoped that he avoids being tarred by David Mitchell's pompous assumption of Anthony Burgess' book blurbs ""the American novel is safe in Gary Shteyngart's gifted hands". Yuk!
 More Sad Than Funny September 6, 2010
Melvyn Bloom (New York)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Shteyngart's new novel lacks the brilliance of his "Absurdistan" and much of the humor falls as flat as the imagination. Told mainly through quotations from diary entries and whatever technologically advanced form of email is transmitted by the ubiquitous "apparats" carried or worn by its characters in the near future, it is a somewhat slower and more frustrating read than one might expect. The satire is biting and ultimately frightening. The narrator is the familiar nebbish--a Woody Allen of the mid-21st century, complete with a Korean-American girlfriend. Her electronic communication with family and friends and her mother's messages to her are amusing and show good understanding of the culture, no doubt from the author's own family experience. By the last page, the reader's dominant feeling is that this is indeed a "sad, sad, sad" story.
Super Dark, but somehow funny (at times) Dystopian Novel September 6, 2010
Gift Card (Hershey, PA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This novel is both a joy and a mental and emotional workout. By extrapolating directly from current trends (and assuming no socio-moral-economic correction occurs--sorry Glenn Beck) Gary Shteyngart creates a very plausible, and for the most part extremely undesirable, future outcome for his adopted country, and by extension, for the civilizations of mankind. While some aspects are a bit sentimental/predictable, most of it is jarring. A lot of it is very, very funny.
I recommend this book with the highest possible level of enthusiasm. Shteyngart is brilliant at his craft; we are taken into an experience, a world, a nation that quickly becomes a convincing alternate reality. We often "figure out" things about this world that somehow elude the narrators, even the thoughtful and melancholy protagonist Lenny, who sometimes seems to speak for the author, and sometimes Lenny draws conclusions from observations of the people and the goings on of his world that our 21st Century minds probably wouldn't. As we pass into and through this dark, dystopian world and the cataclysmic events that unfold there, especially in the last 100 pages or so, the reader recognizes human foibles that have always existed, others that are a product of our current obsession with technologies, and others that are a simple extrapolation of the inevitable outcome of our newly discovered intellectual, moral, fiscal and social laziness.
It made me wonder... did people in the so-called "dark ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire realize that the age they were living in was 'dark'?
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