"Gary Shteyngart's wonderful new novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance -- a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts...but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It's a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings. Mr. Shteyngart spent his earliest childhood in Leningrad, then moved with his family to the United States, and "Super Sad" reflects his dual heritage, combining the dark soulfulness of Russian literature with the antic inventiveness of postmodern American writing; the tenderness of the Chekhovian tradition with the hormonal high jinks of a Judd Apatow movie...It demonstrates a new emotional bandwidth and ratifies his emergence as one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers...In recounting the story of Lenny and Eunice in his antic, supercaffeinated prose, Mr. Shteyngart gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet -- a novel that performs the delightful feat of mashing up an apocalyptic satire with a genuine supersad true love story."
"--"Michiko Kakutani," New York Times"
"Gary Shteyngart's third novel, "Super Sad True Love Story," had to be a total blast to write.
It's an homage to science fiction, George Orwell's "1984 "in particular, with a satirical postmodern overlay of authorial wish fulfillment....The text consists of Lenny's diary entries and Eunice's e-mails to various friends and family. They both write with endearing, sometimes clumsy earnestness, and their intertwining narratives, for all the book's cheeky darkness, pose a superserious question: Can love and language save the world?"
"--Elle"
"Shteyngart makes trenchant, often hilarious, observatio