Gary Shteyngart has made a habit of putting together some lovely trailers for his books, but he has saved his funniest for his long awaited memoir Little Failure.

Featuring James Franco, Rashida Jones, Jonathan Franzen and David Ebershoff, if Little Failure is as good its trailer (and we hear it is), we’re marking it down as one of the must-read books of 2014.

Little Failure: A Memoir

by Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer, or at least an accountant, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka-‘Little Failure’-which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.

A candid and deeply poignant story of a Soviet family’s trials and tribulations, and of their escape in 1979 to the consumerist promised land of the USA, Little Failure is also an exceptionally funny account of the author’s transformation from asthmatic toddler in Leningrad to 40-something Manhattanite with a receding hairline and a memoir to write.

Grab a copy of Little Failure here

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About the Contributor

Andrew Cattanach

Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.

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