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"   Photo: Random House  I was a confused Russian-American teenager living in New Jersey when I first picked up Gary Shteyngart&amp;#039;s debut novel, The Russian Debutante&amp;#039;s Handbook, a satire about the misadventures of a young Russian immigrant whose foolhardy involvement with the mob takes him from Alphabet City to Eastern Europe. Shteyngart\u2014who landed on The New Yorker&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;20 Under 40&amp;quot; list this year\u2014took the kind of bewildered, in-between immigrant identity I struggled through and spun it into a witty, authentic piece of commentary. In his critically beloved second novel, Absurdistan, he again explored the pratfalls of self-exploration with his trademark absurdist wit. In his latest, the beautifully tragic-comic Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart turns his satirical eye away from the Soviet bloc and envisions a not-too-distant American future, where the U.S. enters military rule and its dollar surrenders to the Yuan. The action centers around Lenny, a second-generation Russian whose love of books\u2014printed on paper!\u2014marks him as an outdated weirdo in the tech-obsessed world. Then Lenny falls in love with Eunice, a Korean-American shopaholic who cannot escape the influence of her abusive father. It&amp;#039;s a tale of people, of nations, and of course, of love\u2014but not the sappy kind. We spoke with Shteyngart about his immigrating to America, the woes of the modern world, and the slow demise of fiction.  ELLE: Is Lenny&amp;#039;s aversion to technology a little autobiographical? GS: Hopefully I&amp;#039;m not that big of a schlub, but yes. Recently the cable guy came to my apartment, and, like Lenny, I have a wall of books. He said, &amp;quot;Man, why you got all them books and only a 25-inch TV?&amp;quot; And I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry I have all these smelly old books! I&amp;#039;ll spray Pine-Sol on them.&amp;quot; Being a novelist is like being the last Japanese soldier on an island, shooting away, with nobody having told you that Japan surrendered. ELLE: In Super Sad True Love Story, all of the young people are so involved in technology that they can&amp;#039;t communicate without it, even when they&amp;#039;re face-to-face. What about the modern world made you see that in our future?GS: We&amp;#039;re all connecting in a million different ways, but what does that connection really mean on a personal level? There was a freshman orientation seminar at NYU called &amp;quot;How to Talk Without Facebook,&amp;quot; and they actually had people that would stand up and go, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m from Syosset.&amp;quot; And someone else would stand up and go, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re from Syosset?&amp;quot; They were so shocked that they could communicate without the aid of a machine. Can you imagine a cocktail party 50 years from now? It&amp;#039;ll be so sad; everyone will just sit there &amp;quot;poking&amp;quot; each other. ELLE: Both selfishness and the death of reading are recurring themes in Super Sad True Love Story. How are they connected? GS: When you&amp;#039;re reading a book, you&amp;#039;re surrendering a part of yourself to somebody else&amp;#039;s consciousness, to somebody else&amp;#039;s understanding of themselves and the world. In a sense, it&amp;#039;s a tremendous path to empathy. When you&amp;#039;re writing a story, you&amp;#039;re just basically being yourself and amalgamating your personality onto the page. Both have their purposes, but if one dies\u2014if reading dies\u2014a lot of problems come up. We need to know what it&amp;#039;s like to be in charge and what it&amp;#039;s like to have an emphatic connection with somebody else. That&amp;#039;s something that is missing from our society more and more, and it creates a kind of selfishness, because we don&amp;#039;t know what it&amp;#039;s like to be in another person&amp;#039;s shoes. ELLE: In your experience, to what extent is an immigrant identity a burden?GS: I came to America during the Cold War, and all those movies were coming out\u2014Red Dawn, Red Gerbil, Red Everything. I had to pretend in my Hebrew school that I was born in Berlin instead of Leningrad because people hated all things Russian. It doesn&amp;#039;t burden me personally that much anymore, but I&amp;#039;ve had 11 years of analysis. Children of immigrants are burdened with a strange thing where they&amp;#039;re not really from there, but at the same time, they&amp;#039;re not really sure they&amp;#039;re American either. It&amp;#039;s this weird in-between place, which causes a lot of tension. ELLE: When did you start writing?GS: I was about four or five and my grandma paid me in little pieces of Soviet cheese to write about Lenin. I wrote a story about him and his magical goose trying to go to Finland to start a revolution. Soviet children were so advanced, and the state was like, &amp;quot;Education!&amp;quot; We came to America, and we were like, &amp;quot;Wow, everyone&amp;#039;s a dumbass, but they&amp;#039;re rich!&amp;quot; My parents would import Soviet Algebra textbooks. I remember the formulas in them were really dense, while the American ones had pictures of hot air balloons. ELLE: What is your writing process like?GS: I wake up at 11 am, hung-over. I write for four hours, then I go see my shrink. Then I meet with some other writers who also go to the shrinks near-by and we go to a caf\u00E9 to drink Viennese coffee. Then we have dinner\u2014and a lot of drinks. Then I wake up hung-over, and then the whole thing begins again. I&amp;#039;m a journalist, so I&amp;#039;ve always jotted down things that interested me\u2014the way people talk and act. I find characters that compel me, and then I walk around thinking, &amp;quot;How would what I&amp;#039;m hearing sound to their ears?&amp;quot; And voila\u2014three years later, a novel. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/news/a4912/author-gary-shteyngart-wants-you-to-quit-tweeting-pick-up-a-book-already-7218/>