In My Godless Household, Poems Were The

Memoir Is Not An Act Of History But An Act Of Memory, Which Is Innately Corrupt.

Such A Small, Pure Object A Poem Could Be, Made Of Nothing But Air A Tiny String Of Letters, Maybe Small Enough To Fit In The Palm Of Your Hand. But It Could Blow Everybody's Head Off.

I Kept The Fingers Of My Left Hand Crossed All The Time, While On My Right-hand Fingers I Counted Anything At All—steps To The Refrigerator, Seconds On The Clock, Words In A Sentence—to Keep My Head Occupied. The Counting Felt Like Something To Hang On To, As If Finding The Right Numbers Might Somehow Crack The Code On Whatever System Ran The Slippery Universe We Were Moving Through.

Gary Shteyngart Has Written A Memoir For The Ages. I Spat Laughter On The First Page And Closed The Last With Wet Eyes. Un-put-down-able In The Day And A Half I Spent Reading It, Little Failure Is A Window Into Immigrant Agony And Ambition, Jewish Angst, And Anybody's Desperate Need For A Tribe. Readers Who've Fallen For Shteyngart's Antics On The Page Will Relish The Trademark Humor. But Here It's Laden And Leavened With A Deep, Consequential, Psychological Journey. Brave And Unflinching, Little Failure Is His Best Book To Date

A Dysfunctional Family Is Any Family With More Than One Person In It.