Gary Shteyngart is an American writer born in Leningrad, USSR. Much of his work is satirical and relies on the invention of elaborately fictitious yet somehow familiar places and times. Shteyngart spent the first seven years of his childhood living in a square dominated by a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia; . He comes from a Jewish family and describes his family as typically Soviet. His father worked as an engineer in a LOMO camera factory; his mother was a pianist. Shteyngart emigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up with no television in... the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language. He did not shed his thick Russian accent until the age of 14. Shteyngart took a trip to Prague, and this experience helped spawn his first novel, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.
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