By Luba Patlakh

A national bestselling author whose grandmother would pay in slices of cheese every time he wrote a new page came to speak to students on Monday night about his new book, “Absurdistan,” which was featured on the cover of the April 2006 issue of the “New York Times Book Review.”

His debut novel, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” was noted by “The New York Times,” as, “uproarious and highly entertaining, and by “The Wall Street Journal,” as, “not to be missed.”

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad, Russia, in 1972 and immigrated with his family to Queens at the age of seven. “I started to write when I was just four or five years old,” he said. At the age of four Shteyngart, played between the large legs of Vladimir Lenin’s statue, which was right outside of his window.

“The first little novel I wrote was about Lenin and a magic goose; Lenin and the magic goose had a fight and in the end Lenin ate the goose,” Shteyngart said. “My grandmother was a journalist and really liked my novel, so she encouraged me to write. For each new page that I wrote, she paid me in slices of cheese.” Shteyngart said, to this day, he still writes with a few slices of cheese by his side.

Shteyngart earned a degree in politics at Oberlin College in Ohio and felt that being there was quite a change from living in New York and attending Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan. “Everyone in my high school was an immigrant,” said Shteyngart. “I went to Oberlin because of a girl I was in love with, who broke up with me a week after we got there.”

“Coming to America was more difficult for immigrants who came during my time than it is today,” Shteyngart said. “[Back] then, living in the Soviet Union was like living in a closed society. Kids had nothing to expect in the new world, but today immigrants come over with knowledge of the English language and what MTV is.”

Talking about his first book, Shteyngart said he was the first to write at lengths about his own heritage. “Honestly, I was scared that I was airing my dirty laundry,” said Shteyngart. “I wrote a story which based itself on the details of my own immigrant life.”

Halfway through his lecture, Shteyngart shared a reading from his new book “Absurdistan.” “Some of the ideas for Absurdistan came to me when I was in a bar in the Caspian and a hooker came to me and asked me if I work for ‘Golly Burton,’ she meant the American company Halliburton,” Shteyngart said. “When I told her no I am a Russian writer, she spit and said, ‘I do not like Russian writer.'”

Students in attendance, who are currently reading Shteyngart’s, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” felt that his experiences bled into his writing and after seeing him they could easily pair the characters they were reading about to the personality and character of Gary Shteyngart.