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Adventures in Pure Pleasure
by Gary Shteyngart
The first collection of personal essays, each a delightfully hilarious pursuit of the sublime, the absurd, and the purest of pleasures, from the New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Vera, or Faith.
A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic, Gary Shteyngart is one of the most beloved and viral-y essayists of our day, with nine of his essays appearing in The Best American anthologies. The Sensualist collects his most electric pieces, showcasing why The New York Times describes Gary as "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."
In The Sensualist, Gary chases capybaras, the largest (and cutest) rodent in the world. He joins 7500 fellow passengers on the biggest cruise ship on the seas. He schleps around New York City in search of the best martini. He visits wool merchants and tailors in pursuit of the perfect blue suit. He travels to Naples, Bombay, Havana, and Beijing. He sits on his porch in upstate New York. He puts down his phone and looks up at the stars.
To Gary, a sensualist believes the details of one's life are always worth savoring and happiness can be found from looking around. A sensualist isn't a glutton or an aesthete (and certainly not a snob), but someone who embraces the sublime—and the absurd. In The Sensualist Gary takes us across town and across the world, showing us how to appreciate the joys of life, no matter what.
"Gary Shteyngart's The Sensualist is a hilarious and heartfelt ode to joy. It's a reminder that we are human beings and not life-optimizing, productivity-maxxing robots mixing tablespoons of protein powder into fat-free plain yogurt. Live a little!" —Roz Chast, author of Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York
"Gary Shteyngart's hilarious ode to pleasure reminds me of a fat-washed, navy-strength martini: powerful, dizzying, and necessary. More than just a hedonistic travelogue, The Sensualist is a rousing call to arms, a reminder to wring as much joy out of life as you can and to stop clutching your pearls, unless pearls are your thing, in which case, go nuts." —Simon Rich, author of Glory Days
This information about The Sensualist 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 was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times and have been featured in nine Best American anthologies. He is the author of six bestselling novels including The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story, Our Country Friends, and Vera, or Faith. His books have won several awards including the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature, the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the National Jewish Book Award, and have been published in thirty countries. His memoir, Little Failure, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York with his wife, son, and dog.
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