Memoirs & Coffee Book Group to Discuss "Little Failure" at Bernardsville Library

The next meeting of Bernardsville Public Library’s book discussion group, Memoirs and Coffee, will be held on Tuesday, March 24 at 10:30 am in the library’s Community Room. Manager Pat Kennedy-Grant will lead the discussion of “Little Failure: A Memoir” (2014) by Gary Shteyngart. [The author will not be present.]

After three acclaimed novels, author Gary Shteyngart turned to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. In the book, Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging, told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world. Entertainment Weekly wrote of the book as “Funny, unflinching, and, title notwithstanding, a giant success . . . The innate humor of Shteyngart’s storytelling is dotted with touching sadness, all of it amounting to an engrossing look at his distinct, multilayered Gary-ness.”

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He is the author of the novels “Super Sad True Love Story,” which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world; “Absurdistan,” which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications and has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City and upstate New York.

There is no charge and no registration is needed to join the discussion. Call the library at 766-0118 for more information.