Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Lake Elmo Library | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Oakdale Library | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Valley Library (Lakeland) | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | FICTION SHT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review , Financial Times , The Washington Post , Time , Los Angeles Times , New York Post, Town & Country , Good Housekeeping , Kirkus Reviews
"A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature."--Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)
Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation--a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a "virtuoso performance" ( USA Today ) and "an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart" ( The Washington Post )
In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story .
Author Notes
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1972. He moved to the United States seven years later with his family. He received a bachelor's degree in politics from Oberlin College in Ohio and an MFA in creative writing from City University of New York. 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 other works include Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and Little Failure: A Memoir. He has taught writing at Hunter College, Columbia University, and Princeton University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shteyngart (Lake Success) returns with the droll and heartfelt story of a Russian American couple who invite a group of friends to ride out the lockdown with them on their Hudson Valley "estate" in March 2020. Sasha Senderovsky, a bumbling writer, clumsily prepares for his guests: "Because he did not believe in road marks or certain aspects of relativity, the concept of a blind curve continued to elude him," Shteyngart writes of Sasha's driving, which ends with a case of liquor shattered in the trunk. Sasha's wife, Masha, bans smoking on the property, which Sasha allows his friend Ed Kim to break immediately after showing Ed to his bungalow, one of five along with the main house. There's also Vinood Mehta, a once aspiring writer whose abandoned manuscript factors into a late-breaking plot involving jealousy and betrayal. The couple's eight-year-old adopted daughter, Nat, who is of Chinese descent and is obsessed with K-pop, bonds with their friend Karen Cho, who, like Ed, is Korean, and Shteyngart drops in about as many illuminating details about the Korean diaspora as he does about Russian immigrants and their American children. The author shows great care for his characters, making Sasha's vulnerability particularly palpable when an uncertain screenwriting project threatens his financial stability. Shteyngart's taken the formula for a smart, irresistible comedy of manners and expertly brought it up to the moment. Agent: Denise Shannon, Denise Shannon Literary. (Nov.)
Booklist Review
In Shteyngart's (Lake Success, 2018) clever Chekhovian satire, once-successful writer Sasha Senderovsky, his psychiatrist wife, Masha, and their precocious adopted daughter, Natasha, have abandoned the city for their upstate bungalow colony to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic. They are joined there by Sasha's childhood friends Vinod and Karen and Karen's dandyish distant cousin, Ed. Sasha's former student Dee adds a sexual charge to the proceedings with her southern drawl and the literary success of her hip, zeitgeist-capturing novel. Rounding out the group is the Actor, a narcissistic sex-symbol and method actor with whom Sasha hopes to adapt his early novel and thus revive his career and finances. This petri dish of personalities provides ample conditions for simmering jealousies, fervent glances, and unrequited love to thrive inside the idyllic compound while the country is ravaged by disease and fractured by political discord. Alas, human nature will prevail. Compelled by urges, riven by desires and the unearthing of long-buried betrayals, the group splinters. Situated in the summer of 2020, Shteyngart's big-hearted drama is timely yet timeless with its penetrating and nuanced social commentary exploring identity, racism, celebrity culture, social media, and humanity. Above all, Shteyngart artfully exemplifies love in its many registers--parental, brotherly, romantic--in what is ultimately a "super sad true love" story.
Guardian Review
I have met people, mercifully few in number, who just don't respond to Chekhov. For me, his four main plays (Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull and Three Sisters) are stone-cold masterpieces, timeless examinations of the human condition. But some people, slap them in the best seat in the stalls and they'll ask what all the fuss is about: a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving even less? And perhaps now, with Gary Shteyngart's latest book, I'm beginning to understand their bewilderment. Our Country Friends, a Chekhov-inspired Covid novel, comes lauded with every form of praise from serious Americans, up to and including the word "masterpiece". And yet here I am in the Crush Bar, staring into my G&T and wondering what I'm missing. The initial premise is more Boccaccio than Anton Pavlovich. Sasha, a Russian-born and previously successful satiric novelist, has invited his closest friends up to his "house on the hill" somewhere on the east coast to sit out the disease now running rampant through New York. But it opens nevertheless like any good Chekhov - after a self-conscious page of dramatis personae, straight out of a 19th-century playscript - with old retainers running round, preparing the estate. Sasha has near-bankrupted himself to build four bungalows around the main house, each to safely accommodate a guest. There's Vinod (Indian immigrant) and Karen (Korean immigrant), Sasha's friends since maths high school. There's Ed, also Korean, now a trust-fund idler, and Dee (surname Cameron, making sure we don't entirely lose track of that Boccaccio analogy), a former creative writing student of Sasha's, now firebrand essayist. And one extra guest is promised: The Actor. In a Trollopian touch, he is never awarded an actual name but again fills a classic Chekhovian role: the impossibly handsome and successful incomer (think Trigorin or Vershinin) who drives the men to despair and the women to masturbation, including Sasha's psychiatrist wife Masha. And now, once they're nicely settled in? They behave according to Standard Chekhovian Operating Practice: fall in love, bemoan their lack of fulfilment, fall out of love and then the estate is sold. In a slight deviation, a Shakespearean touch is required to trigger The Actor's amour fou for Dee: Karen is a newly minted tech billionaire following the sale of her app, Tröö Emotions. This app, by toying with a selfie of two willing participants, somehow induces unstoppable love (usually). It's slightly less credible than Oberon's wild thyme bank but still generates the kind of intense, semi-requited passion that runs through most Chekhovs. Which is not to say that all the action is old world. Dee's shtick is "y'all-ism", trading on her Poor White Roots (think Hillbilly Elegy) but when the George Floyd murder erupts outside, bifurcating the country, she finds herself at the wrong end of Twitter for standing by "my people", namely southern whites with racist inclinations. Social media may have anointed them "The First Couple of Quarantine" but now The Actor's retinue strongly advises him to cut and run. But he is soon back, still agonisingly in love, and craving the antidote. Somehow Karen (off you go again, Puck) knows exactly what to say to him, which images of his former self to show him in order to explode this ersatz, algorithmic passion of his. She sits and talks him through it - bizarrely staying indoors, bungalow windows closed - and thus, the final Chekhovian piece slots in: bang goes that Covid gun that was on the wall in the first chapter. The disease has breached the commune. The American praise quoted on the dust jacket promises a "brilliant" "laugh out loud" tragicomedy, but I didn't laugh and I didn't cry. I wonder if too many of its culture-war references - the dark foreboding on the roads around the estate, a menacing "black pickup" which seems to embody the White Lives Matter backlash - simply lack the same pungency for a British readership. The friction between self-regarding Manhattan creatives and barely managing upstate farmers should be fertile enough ground for any novelist, but I constantly felt as though I'd forgotten to pack the codebook. Which left me with the mere domestic shenanigans of the characters, namely a whole lot of rich people complaining about nothing and achieving less.
Kirkus Review
The Levin-Senderovskys--Sasha, Masha, and little Natasha--wait out the virus at their country estate with four close friends and one movie star. One of Sasha Senderovsky's fondest memories of his childhood is the bungalow colony catering to Russian immigrant families where he first met his wife, Masha. With the proceeds of his once-successful writing career, he has built a colony of his own, though it's in an area of New York state where a deconstructed swastika is becoming a popular bumper sticker, and he's having trouble scraping together the cash to get the dead tree limbs out of the driveway before the party starts. Karen Cho and Vinod Mehta have been his best friends since high school. She's stratospherically rich after creating an app that makes people fall in love; he's failed at everything except being a very good person and loving Karen ceaselessly from afar. They are joined by Karen's distant cousin, an international dandy named Ed; Senderovsky's beautiful former student Dee, who leverages her Southern drawl and heritage to great effect on and off the page; and someone known only as the Actor, whose fame, charisma, and good looks are almost beyond description. Except Shteyngart, most recently of the fantastic Lake Success (2018) and most famously of Super Sad True Love Story (2010), can describe anything. Russian: "a language built around the exhalation of warmth and pain." Cheeses: "so filled with aromatic herbs they inspired (on Senderovsky's part) memories that had never happened." One could go on. When the curtain rises on the House on the Hill, as the place is known, it's early March 2020; Senderovsky has to ask his guests to refrain from hugging because "Masha's gone all epidemiological." Everyone seems to gather that they'll be staying for a while, but, of course, they have no idea. Uncle Vanya, K-pop, and Japanese reality TV will all play important roles, and just about everyone gets to fall in love. The Great American Pandemic Novel only Shteyngart could write, full of hyphenated identities, killer prose, and wild vitality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This latest from Shteyngart (Lake Success) isn't the first work of fiction to touch on COVID-19, but it is the most explicit pandemic novel yet. Kicking off during the virus's uncertain early days, the book concerns a group of family, friends, and lovers who gather at a sprawling bungalow colony to idle away lockdown with food and booze and contend with the inevitable discord that arises as their stay stretches on. After 18 months of inuring ourselves to new normals, Shteyngart's journey back to the beginning is dizzying, all action bathed in early-pandemic surreality. He details guesswork safety protocols with a light comic absurdity, and his always-bold prose is as strong as ever: In his world, glasses of wine are poured with the "prophylactic aid of an oven mitt." But as vividly as this novel recalls a dreamlike near-past, it's reductive to think of it only as pandemic portraiture. The pandemic is more like set dressing for Shteyngart's usual humanism; his concerns widen to encompass the menace of technology and the ill feeling so often rooted in enduring relationships, romantic or platonic. COVID-19's most essential role here is as symbol: of division, of isolation, of fear, of living in modern America, but also of overcoming, persisting, surviving. VERDICT Both the definitive COVID-19 novel and not, this work captures an uncertain modernity and speaks to the existential peril of contemporary life.--Luke Gorham, Galesburg P.L., IL
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The House on the Hill was in a tizzy. Workmen's trucks streamed up the long gravel driveway. Two sets of plumbers from both sides of the river had been summoned to dewinterize the five bungalows behind the main house, and they did not care for one another. A broken set of windows in one bungalow had to be replaced posthaste, and a family of field mice had chewed through the electrical cable powering another. The handyman, who did not live on the property, was so overwhelmed by the state of affairs, he retreated to the extensive covered porch to eat a cheese sandwich in long deliberative bites. The mistress of the house, Masha, had lowered the shades in her first-floor office to escape the cacophony of modern tools and loud country cursing. At times, she would peek out to note the surfaces that would have to be wiped down after the workmen left. Natasha (who liked to go by Nat), her eight-year-old daughter, was upstairs, illuminated by a screen in the darkness of her room, in a lonely public world of her own. The only happy member of the household was Alexander Borisovich Senderovsky, known as Sasha to his friends. "Happy," we should say, with an asterisk. He was agitated as well as excited. A windstorm had brought down the heavy branches of two dead trees flanking the driveway, scattering the vast front lawn with their dead white rot. Senderovsky liked to expound at length upon the "entropic" nature of his estate, the way all manner of growth was allowed to go its own way, sumacs elbowing out more well-heeled plants, ivy poisoning the perimeter, groundhogs bringing destruction upon the gardens. But the scattering of dead tree limbs made the House on the Hill look apocalyptic, the very thing Senderovsky's guests were coming up to escape. The handyman claimed a bad back and was not handy enough to remove all the tree limbs on his own, and the so-called tree guy had gone missing. Senderovsky, in his athletic pants and wildly colored dressing gown, had tried to move one of these prehistoric-looking branches himself, but the very first heave made him fear a hernia. "Ah, the hell with it," he said, and got into his car. A word about the car. Well, not so much about the car, as the way in which it was driven. Senderovsky had only learned to drive three years ago, at the milestone age of forty-five, and only within the limits of a country setting. The highway on the other side of the river unsettled him. He was a fiercely awful driver. The half-empty local roads inspired him to "gun" the engine of his sturdy but inflexible Swedish automobile, and he saw the yellow stripes bisecting the roads as suggestions meant for "less experienced drivers," whoever that might be. Because he did not believe in road marks or certain aspects of relativity, the concept of a blind curve continued to elude him. (His wife no longer allowed him to drive with their child onboard.) What was worse, he had somewhere picked up the phrase "tooling around." And now Senderovsky raced to his errands, mindful only of the speed traps, set with boring predictability on the frayed edges of towns or the school zones, where the fines could be doubled. First, he visited his butchers, two former catalog models from the city, now a husband and wife, who plied their trade out of a barn so red it verged on the patriotic. The two magnificent twenty-five-year-olds, all teeth and coveralls, presented him with a wrapped parcel of sweet and Italian sausages, glistening hamburger patties, and his secret weapon: lamb steaks that clung to the bone, so fresh they could only have been rivaled by a restaurant Senderovsky admired in Rome's abattoir district. The very sight of meat for tomorrow's cookout inspired in him a joy that in a younger man could be called love. Not because of the meat itself, but because of the conversations that would flow around it as it was marinated, grilled, and served, despite the growing restrictions on such closeness. By noon tomorrow, his best friends, the ones who had been so hard to bring together during previous summers, would finally unite, brought together by the kernels of a growing tragedy to be sure, but brought together nonetheless, in his favorite place on earth, the House on the Hill. Of course, someone else was coming, too. Someone who was not a friend. Someone who made Senderovsky, already a drinker, drink more. With that in mind, he sped to the liquor store in the richest village in the district, which occupied the premises of a former church. He bought two cases of Austrian Riesling at the south transept, another of rosé at the north, along with a third case of Beaujolais, wildly out of season, but a nostalgic wine for him and his high-school friends, Vinod and Karen. Ed, as always, would be the hardest to accommodate. Deep in the sacristy, Senderovsky picked out an eighteen-year-old bottle of something beyond his means, two bottles each of cognac and rye, and, to show his frivolous side, schnapps and a strange single malt from the Tyrol. The proprietor, a shaggy Anglo with a rosacea nose peeking out from his loosely worn mask, looked very pleased as he rang up the many purchases, his fingers clad in black disposable gloves. "Just got a call from the state," he said to Senderovsky. "They might shut me down any day now as nonessential." Senderovsky sighed and bought an extra case of the Riesling and two bottles of an artisanal gin he had never heard of. He could picture Ed pursing his lips around a glass and pronouncing it "drinkable." When the final bill, adding up to just over four digits, meandered out of the machine in many long spurts, Senderovsky's hand could barely slalom through his signature. A special occasion, he consoled himself. With his trunk now filled with bottles as well as meats, he gunned his car toward yet another village, this one fifteen miles north, to do some more marketing, after which he was due to drop off the meat and pick up Ed from the train station. At the exit for the bridge crossing the river, he ran into a line of cars. Nothing irritated Senderovsky more than the local version of a traffic jam. He brought a city impatience to the rural life. Around here it was considered impolite to honk, but Senderovsky honked. He rolled down his window, thrust out his long bony face, and honked some more with the palm of his hand, the way he had seen men do in films. The car in front of him was not moving. It sat low to the ground, a rusted wheelbarrow jammed into its trunk, a national flag fluttering from the driver's window, and a partly peeled sticker on the bumper that read i stand by my pres . . . Senderovsky realized that at this pace there was no way he could go to the store and drop off the meat before Ed's train arrived. Ignoring the very clear markings on the road warning against just such a maneuver, he whipsawed his car around, and within minutes was charging up his long driveway, once again cursing the fallen tree branches that ruined the approach to the House on the Hill. As he noisily threw the meat into the industrial-sized freezer in the vast white kitchen (the house had once belonged to a chef), he dialed the boy from across the river who came round to do the lawn mowing, begging him to get rid of the branches. But the boy had other things to do. "What things?" Senderovsky challenged, threatening to pay double. Out on the covered porch he confronted the handyman who was listening to old music on a handsome red radio, but all he got was "The missus told me I wasn't to move anything heavy on account of the back." Senderovsky's own missus now stepped onto the porch in her kaftan, arms akimbo, her fingers pressed into the softness of her abdomen. "I can't work with all this noise," Masha said in Russian to her husband, mindful of the handyman. "It's a workday for me. My patients can barely hear me and they're agitated as it is." "What noise?" "There's drilling by the bungalows, and you're throwing meat in the freezer and yelling at the lawn boy." "Darling," Senderovsky answered, using an inflated diminutive of the term: dorogushka. He had known his wife since they were children. Russian was a language built around the exhalation of warmth and pain, but lately Senderovsky had found his declarations of love for his wife stilted, as if he were reading them from a play. "The workers will knock off at three, as they always do," he said. "And I've only to pick up Ed and get the groceries." The handyman stared at them for the aliens they were. When he had started working for them three years ago, they were of approximate size, two smallish figures, college professors most likely (a tiny but very active college was within striking range of Senderovsky's car), annoying in their requests and frugal in their outlays, but speaking with one slightly accented city voice. Now the woman had become larger, more local-looking around the waist and arms, while the man had done the opposite, had shrunk and emaciated himself and lost most of his hair, his only salient points a sharp nose and the brick of a forehead, to the point that the handyman suspected he was ill. In another reversal, the husband seemed happier today, despite the seeping sibilants of the language they spoke, while she had taken on his former briskness. Whatever this weekend would bring, the handyman thought, it would not be good. Excerpted from Our Country Friends: A Novel by Gary Shteyngart All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.