From his 2010 Q & A with Emily Greenhouse for Granta:
Who would win in a ‘Great American Novel’ Celebrity Death Match – you or Jonathan Franzen?Avi Steinberg, a former prison librarian, thought Lindsay Lohan should read Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story in jail.
Tony Blair.
Do you think Chelsea Clinton would have converted, had she married you?
To atheism? She’d better!
George Steiner said that the ‘genius of Judaism’ is its history of Diaspora: wandering, powerless homelessness that rendered the Exiled Jew universal, ‘unto the elements … free.’ Do you think assimilation and an established ‘homeland’ have weakened the historic Jewish relationship between exile and identity? Does it matter? You once said, ‘Saul Bellow was an immigrant like I’m an octopus.’ Are you saying that the Jewish immigrant narrative is no longer authentic?
Well, I don’t know how it is with Jews in Britain, but out here in America we ...[read on]
Read about Shteyngart's heroine from outside literature.
--Marshal Zeringue