Gary Shteyngart — Vera, or Faith - with Angie Kim

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half-Jewish, half-Korean, and wholly original.Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school; Daddy and Anne Mom to stay together; and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.Both biting and deeply moving, Vera, or Faith is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to What Maisie Knew, Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, Vera, or Faith demonstrates why Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers."PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593595091?ic_referral=P8fEUycnbAKfddmrcT-KINBkQHvd8-mx-stIDDrRysQwM6tT8xxUayID0bARxmCcAp0dT4AwHF_luIToRR7Xx6_LZpm5z7O9bUOrjhLMdJQsT7nB6y17LWeirEtUGlIc4yC9fpcGary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His second novel, Absurdistan, was one of the The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year . His novel Super Sad True Love Story won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and became one of the most iconic novels of the decade. His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is the New York Times bestseller Our Country Friends. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.Shteyngart is in conversation with Angie Kim, the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a GMA and B&N book club pick, Virginia Literary Award winner, Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023, and accordingly to Gary Shteyngart, is "what Dostoevsky might have written if he had been an American and also not a jerk". Her debut, Miracle Creek, was an Edgar winner and one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.