Gary Shteyngart and Jane Ciabattari at Lit Hub:
Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties as the Russian Jewish-Korean daughter of immigrants surviving in a fraught domestic atmosphere made me pull Shteyngart’s panic-loaded 2014 memoir Little Failure from my bookcase. Yes, there are echoes of the “tightly wound” young Gary, who begins his first unpublished novel in English at ten, in Vera, or Faith. But Vera, in her heart, knows she’s not a failure. And the life of immigrants in 2025 is infinitely more complicated than a decade ago.
Ironically, Vera’s existence may result from a sushi lunch that went sideways. Indeed, Shteyngart wrote Vera, or Faith, in a whirlwind. His editor, David Ebershoff, mentioned that he delivered the novel 51 days after a sushi lunch at which Ebershoff suggested the multigenerational saga Shteyngart had been working on wasn’t working.
more here.
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