[5] Shteyngart immigrated to the United States in 1979 and was brought up in Queens, New York,[6] with no television in the apartment in which he lived, where English was not the household language.

[7] He is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School[8] in New York City, and Oberlin College in Ohio, where he earned a degree in politics, in 1995,[9] with a senior thesis on the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova and Tajikistan.

[6][10] Shteyngart took a trip to Prague in the early 1990s,[11] and this experience helped spawn his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set in the fictitious European city of Prava.

[16] Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature.

Super Sad True Love Story (2010) was promoted by a film trailer with Paul Giamatti and James Franco.

[19][20] Thirty-five years after he emigrated to the U.S., in January, 2014, Random House published Little Failure: A Memoir,[21] and promoted it by a film trailer with James Franco and Rashida Jones.

[33][38] He spends six months out of the year at a house in northern Dutchess County, in the Hudson River Valley where he does nearly all of his writing.