Little Neck's Own: Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart has only written three novels, but each book has been met with acclaim and landed on bestseller lists.

Two years ago, the former Little Neck resident was named by The New Yorker as one of the 20 best fiction writers under the age of 40.

The author was born as Igor Shteyngart in St. Petersburg and lived with his father, an engineer, and mother, a pianist, in Russia until age 7.

In 1979, the family moved to the United States, settling down in Little Neck.

As a child, English was not the Shteyngart household’s primary language, so Gary held onto a thick accent into his teenage years.

As a child in northeast Queens, Shteyngart attended Hebrew school before studying at Stuyvesant High School and then Oberlin College.

He moved back to New York City to become a writer, attending graduate school at Hunter College.

His debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” was both a critical hit and a bestseller.

The book, which chronicles Jewish immigrant Vladimir Girshkin’s trials and tribulations in Alphabet City, was named as a New York Times notable book and won the Stephen Crane Award for first fiction.

His sophomore novel, “Absurdistan,” tells the story of an overweight man, who is the 1,238th richest man in Russia, attempting to return to his true love in the Bronx.

The book was named as one of the New York Times’s five best novels of the year and ranked as one of 2006’s best books by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Time Magazine.

His third novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is set in a dystopian future in which life is dominated by the media and materialism.

The 2010 novel won the Salon Book Award and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize.

Shteyngart currently lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and teaches a course on immigrant literature at Columbia University.