Gary Shteyngart and Paul LaFarge: There’s a Tornado Coming… Let’s Talk Craft

Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually new, sometimes classic and occasionally obscure but always worth knowing about.

All summer we’ve been inviting previous Bookable guests back to the show to talk to other authors they admire. In this episode, we’re breaking the mold because there are just too many authors we haven’t been able to get on the show—yet. In our latest installment: Gary Shteyngart and Paul LaFarge. Paul and Gary live in upstate New York in neighboring towns. They talk about writing and craft and living through this present moment—all while a tornado heads directly for them.

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Gary Shteyngart is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Little Failure (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and the novels Super Sad True Love Story (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Absurdistan, and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). His books regularly appear on best-of lists around the world and have been published in thirty countries.

Paul La Farge is the author of four novels: The Night Ocean, The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, and Luminous Airplanes; and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, the Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere.