Critics' Opinion:
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Published Sep 2018
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times.
Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son's diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema - a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth - has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration of the 0.1 Percent, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to what really makes America great.
"Starred Review. As good as anything we've seen from this author: smart, relevant, fundamentally warm-hearted, hilarious of course, and it has a great ending." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. This is a road trip through a heartland both national and personal with one man's dysfunction echoing his country's as Barry attempts to escape the present only to have the present confront him in the end." - Library Journal
"[Lake Success is] a stylish, big-hearted novel. Shteyngart made his name as a sharp satirist, and he'll undoubtedly widen his appeal with this effort." - Publishers Weekly
"In Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart hears America perfectly: its fatuity, its poignant lament, its boisterous self-loathing. Its heartbeat. Reading him sometimes makes me want to scream - with recognition and with pure hilarity." - Richard Ford
"Lake Success is Gary Shteyngart, so you already know it's the funniest book you'll read all year. But the surprise here is the novel's epic sweep, its melancholy resonance. What begins as a rollicking and zinger-filled road trip sneakily deepens into a poignant tale of a man trying to outrace his problems. I was utterly floored by Shteyngart's staggeringly beautiful denouement." - Maria Semple
"Lake Success takes us on an unforgettable road trip through an America that's ominously divided, wildly diverse, and weirdly familiar. Gary Shteyngart writes about money and marriage with brutal honesty, virtuoso wit, and stubborn compassion for his deeply flawed but still somehow lovable characters." - Tom Perrotta
"Gary Shteyngart has given us a trip through the American wasteland - from the people who have too little to the people who have too much. Incredibly smart, incredibly funny, incredibly tragic, and therefore incredibly human, this is the perfect novel for these dysfunctional times." - Nathan Hill
This information about Lake Success was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.
Link to Gary Shteyngart's Website
Name Pronunciation
Gary Shteyngart: SHTAYN-gahrt (first syllable rhymes with mine, second with heart)
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