| Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel |  | Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 117
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400066409
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9781400066407
ASIN: 1400066409
Publication Date: July 27, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2010: Welcome to the day after tomorrow. In Gary Shteyngart's near-future New York, the dollar has been pegged to the yuan, the American Restoration Authority is on high security alert, and Lenny Abramov, the middle-aged possessor of a decent credit score but an absurdly low--and embarrassingly public--Male Hotness rating, is in love with the young Eunice Park. Like many of the clients of his employer, the Post-Human Services division of the Staatling-Wapachung Corporation, he'd also like to live forever, but all he really wants is to love Eunice. And for a time, despite the traditional challenges of their gaps in age and ethnicity and the more modern hurdle of an oppressively networked culture that makes your most private identity as transparent as the Onionskin jeans that are all the rage, he does. Super Sad True Love Story is as corrosively hilarious as you'd expect from the satirist of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, but what may surprise you are the moments when the satire hits bedrock and the story becomes--no air quotes required--sad, true, and very much a love story. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
The author of two critically acclaimed novels, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. Now, in his hilarious and heartfelt new novel, he envisions a deliciously dark tale of America’s dysfunctional coming years—and the timeless and tender feelings that just might bring us back from the brink.
In a very near future—oh, let’s say next Tuesday—a functionally illiterate America is about to collapse. But don’t that tell that to poor Lenny Abramov, the thirty-nine-year-old son of an angry Russian immigrant janitor, proud author of what may well be the world’s last diary, and less-proud owner of a bald spot shaped like the great state of Ohio. Despite his job at an outfit called Post-Human Services, which attempts to provide immortality for its super-rich clientele, death is clearly stalking this cholesterol-rich morsel of a man. And why shouldn’t it? Lenny’s from a different century—he totally loves books (or “printed, bound media artifacts,” as they’re now known), even though most of his peers find them smelly and annoying. But even more than books, Lenny loves Eunice Park, an impossibly cute and impossibly cruel twenty-four-year-old Korean American woman who just graduated from Elderbird College with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness.
After meeting Lenny on an extended Roman holiday, blistering Eunice puts that Assertiveness minor to work, teaching our “ancient dork” effective new ways to brush his teeth and making him buy a cottony nonflammable wardrobe. But America proves less flame-resistant than Lenny’s new threads. The country is crushed by a credit crisis, riots break out in New York’s Central Park, the city’s streets are lined with National Guard tanks on every corner, the dollar is so over, and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Undeterred, Lenny vows to love both Eunice and his homeland. He’s going to convince his fickle new love that in a time without standards or stability, in a world where single people can determine a dating prospect’s “hotness” and “sustainability” with the click of a button, in a society where the privileged may live forever but the unfortunate will die all too soon, there is still value in being a real human being.
Wildly funny, rich, and humane, Super Sad True Love Story is a knockout novel by a young master, a book in which falling in love just may redeem a planet falling apart.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 59
 Super Dark, but somehow funny (at times) Dystopian Novel September 6, 2010
Gift Card (Hershey, PA)
This novel is both a joy and a mental and emotional workout. By extrapolating directly from current trends (and assuming no socio-moral-economic correction occurs--sorry Glenn Beck) Gary Shteyngart creates a very plausible, and for the most part extremely undesirable, future outcome for his adopted country, and by extension, for the civilizations of mankind. While some aspects are a bit sentimental/predictable, most of it is jarring. A lot of it is very, very funny.
I recommend this book with the highest possible level of enthusiasm. Shteyngart is brilliant at his craft; we are taken into an experience, a world, a nation that quickly becomes a convincing alternate reality. We often "figure out" things about this world that somehow elude the narrators, even the thoughtful and melancholy protagonist Lenny, who sometimes seems to speak for the author, and sometimes Lenny draws conclusions from observations of the people and the goings on of his world that our 21st Century minds probably wouldn't. As we pass into and through this dark, dystopian world and the cataclysmic events that unfold there, especially in the last 100 pages or so, the reader recognizes human foibles that have always existed, others that are a product of our current obsession with technologies, and others that are a simple extrapolation of the inevitable outcome of our newly discovered intellectual, moral, fiscal and social laziness.
It made me wonder... did people in the so-called "dark ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire realize that the age they were living in was 'dark'?
 Super Sad True Love Story: a Novel September 6, 2010
Read this book
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel was very disappointing. It was not as not as cleverly written as his prior works.
Witty, shocking and funny- I'm just truly sad that this lovely story ended September 4, 2010
Masha279
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I started reading this book having never read anything else by this author and with no idea what this story was about. If anything, I was worried that it would be melodramatic from the sound of the title. By the time I finished the first page I realized that this novel is anything but a breezy, sappy story. The satire was almost biting at times, but this book managed to make me laugh and almost cry before I finished it. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes well written fiction with heaps of social commentary and a sardonic twist.
Shteyngart's best yet September 2, 2010
Mal Warwick (Berkeley, California)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Imagine the USA 10 or 15 years down the road. The dollar is pegged to the yuan, and a tyrannical right-wing government is in power. The divide between High Net Worth Individuals and Low is a chasm that cannot be spanned. The country is bogged down in a losing war in Venezuela. Everyone carries an "apparat" -- an always-online device that broadcasts its carrier's Male or Female Hotness, health and nutritional benchmarks, and provides access to intimate correspondence. Not only are there no secrets from the government. There are no secrets among the people, either. Even your credit rating hovers brightly in the air above your head when you pass a Credit Pole on the street.
This is the USA Gary Shteyngart creates to showcase the truly sad love story of Lenny Abramov (Russian-American, age 39, depressive reader of books) and Eunice Park (Korean-American, age 24, anorexic, self-obsessed, and cruel shopaholic like all her friends). The tale of their troubled relationship plays out against the backdrop of a city (New York) and a country in the throes of total collapse. It's not a pretty picture -- but it's extremely funny.
Super Sad True Love Story is Shteyngart's third novel, and it's the best of the lot. It follows The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, both brilliantly satirical. All three are characterized by the author's masterful way with language and his delicious sense of humor.
(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)
Page turner August 31, 2010
G. Hopkins (Brooklyn, NY)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Beware! My life was put on hold by this plot. I just couldn't put the thing down.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 59
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