The Russian Debutante's Handbook A Novel. Winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, National Jewish Book Award for Fiction et al. prizes

"As attuned to the exhilarating possibilities of the language as Martin Amis, as deadpan and funny as the young Evelyn Waugh." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"In Vladimir Girshkin, the wisecracking, lovelorn, desperately self-reinventing protagonist, Shteyngart has given us a literary symbol for this new immigrant age, much as Saul Bellow or Henry Roth did in theirs..." Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post

"A brilliant, funny debut describing the vicissitudes of immigration today, as experienced by the hero, a young Russian-American." Harper's Bazaar

"The rampaging narrative is festooned on every page with glittering one-liners, improbably apt similes, and other miniature pleasures." Elle

"If Henry Miller were Russian, this is a book he might have written." Time Out New York

"[Gary Shteyngart's] sense of the exploded past and volatile present suffuses this gifted first novel..." O. Magazine