VIDEO: Super Sad True Interview With Gary Shteyngart

Jacques Berlinerblau, director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, recently interviewed the novelist Gary Shteyngart (scroll down to see a video of the interview sponsored by Georgetown University in conjunction with the Chronicle’s Arts & Academe blog).

Warning: While it’s not as adult as what Shteyngart suspects your kids might be watching anyway, the conversation does have some off-color bits.

Let’s let Berlinerblau himself introduce the chat:

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Novelist Gary Shteyngart is, like, the funnest guy in the world. More fun, you ask, than that secularization hypothesis fellow from Munich we had give a talk here back in ’06? Gosh that guy was fun!

Yes, Gary Shteyngart is even more fun than him.

And Gary is super talented too. I consider his recent novel Super Sad True Love Story to be his most accomplished work of fiction yet. His first book, the 2002 The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, is a scream and it features the most hysterical spoof of college creative writing people ever put to paper (Shteyngart is an assistant professor in Columbia University’s Creative Writing program).

His 2006 Absurdistan was a huge hit. I had some reservations about the work. But let’s just say that hundreds of thousands of readers who put that book on bestseller lists around the world may not have shared my concerns.

In this interview we discuss his latest offering as well as the dysfunctions shared by Korean-Americans and Jewish-Americans, the death of serious book reviewing, Oklahoma (not the musical), and the experimental novel.

Through it all Mr. Shteyngart is relentlessly funny and thoughtful and, given the average life expectancy of the American male, I am happy to report that we will be reading this guy for the next three decades or so.

—Jacques Berlinerblau