In support of his new memoir, Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart’s been touring the country. Lucky for us, he’s keeping a journal:
Philip Roth, in a 2000 interview with David Remnick in the pages of this magazine, speaks about the declining number of serious readers in America—he supposes it might even have dwindled to around five thousand. But, Roth says, “five thousand is a lot of people. And, as a friend of mine said about five thousand people, ‘if they came through your living room one at a time, they’d have you in tears.’” Today, that number has fallen to about four thousand, by my estimate, but the intensity of the connection between reader and writer has never been stronger.
Find the rest over at the New Yorker; Shteyngart also reminisces about day-time television, the southern iced tea question, and Atlanta’s chicken and waffles.
