Video: Q&A with Gary Shteyngart

In this video, Gary Shteyngart answers live-tweeted questions about his novel Super Sad True Love Story after a reading City of Asylum/Pittsburgh on May 10. During the Q & A, Shteyngart jokes with moderator Eric Shiner and the audience about his uncanny ability to predict fashion trends, as well as fictional technologies that could rate him “ugliest man in the room with the fourth best credit rating.”

Shteyngart (born Igor Shteyngart in 1972) 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.
His novels include The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2003), Absurdistan(2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (2010), which was selected one of the 10 best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani and recently won this year’s Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Eric Shiner, who is a University of Pittsburgh graduate and a western Pennsylvania native, returned home after 10 years to become Acting Director and the first Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum.