Put together one of America’s best novelists – the irreverent Russian-born Gary Shteyngart – and the only UK comedian who is an expert in Yiddish – the sparkling David Schneider – and you will get a super-funny, super-sharp conversation about the future of books, media culture, the fall of the American empire and our need for love.

Little Failure is the alarming pet-name given to the young Gary Shteyngart by his father when growing up in pre-Glasnost Russia is a remarkable immigrant memoir. A candid and poignant story of a Soviet family’s trials and tribulations, and of their 1979 escape to the consumerised promised land of the United States, it is also an exceptionally funny account of the author’s transformation from asthmatic Moscow toddler to 40-something Manhattanite with a receding hairline and a memoi...

“If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus”, wrote Gary Shteyngart on his friend’s debut novel, A Sense of Direction. JBW brings the two writers together to discuss an incredible series of pilgrimages. Inspired by his rabbi father’s late coming out as a gay m...