Gary Shteyngart in Conversation With Carolyn Kellogg

It’s March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends, and friends-of-friends, gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances take hold, while old betrayals emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. In his latest novel, Gary Shteyngart documents through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends (Random House) is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller, Super Sad True Love Story. Shteyngart will be joined in conversation by Carolyn Kellogg, writer, critic, and former Books Editor of the Los Angeles Times.

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