Closing Night Featuring Gary Shteyngart

Join us as we close our festival week with the incomparable Gary Shteyngart discussing his new book, Our Country Friends with editor David Ebershoff.

Co-sponsor: Doris and Frederick Blechman

About Our Country Friends (Click here to purchase)

It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gather in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals emerge, forcing each person to re-evaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters include: 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 flame-thrower/essayist; and a movie star whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. In a remarkable literary feat, Gary Shteyngart has documented through fiction the emotional toll of our recent times: a story of love and friendship that reads like a great Russian novel set in upstate New York.