Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart (born July 5, 1972) is a Soviet-born American writer. Much of his work is satirical. Born Igor Semyonovich Shteyngart (Russian: Игорь Семёнович Штейнгарт) in the Soviet Union, he spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg—which he alternately calls "St. Leningrad" or "St. Leninsburg". He comes from a Jewish family, with an ethnically Russian maternal grandparent, and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. When he was five, he wrote a 100-page comic novel