The ICA invites acclaimed author Gary Shteyngart to discuss his best-selling new novel Vera, or Faith (2025, Random House), a family drama set in an America on a slow slide toward totalitarianism.
This conversation is a part of the ICA series Author RVA, in which Lit Hub senior editor and novelist Jessie Gaynor, author and NPR host Mary Childs, and ICA Director of Community Media Chioke I’Anson host author conversations with notable contemporary journalists, memoirists, and writers of fiction and nonfiction to hear about how they tackle their craft, find inspiration, and quiet the creative doubt.
Talk 5–6 p.m. Reception 6–7. p.m.
About the Author: Gary 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. Shteyngart’s other novels include: Absurdistan (one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year); Super Sad True Love Story (Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize); and Our Country Friends (a New York Times bestseller). His memoir, Little Failure, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His most recent novel is Vera, or Faith. His books have been published in thirty countries. He lives in New York with his wife and son.
About Vera, or Faith: 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.”
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