Gary Shteyngart

Oh, Salman Rushdie liked this.

Wow.

Life is really good.

I mean, do I think that there's a future in long-form fiction?

I think it's going to be very much just, speaking of fetish, like a very small, tiny group of people that do this.

And most people simply will not have, even today, I think something like 47% of Americans have read a full-length book in the last year.

So this is obviously going to be a very minority position.

But when I write myself, I...

What do people in California call it, or in Silicon Valley call it, the end user experience.

For me, because I hope I write funny, I think the humor is the thing that gives you that little hit.

It keeps the reader hopefully somewhat attached to the page.

So this is the interesting thing.

right?

Like, does writing have to, I don't know, will we have books that explode while you read them in order to get your attention in the future?

That could be a great technology, or it releases a plume of smoke or something.

It's like, oh yeah, right, right, I gotta get back to that.

There's an interesting tension around that in the book because one of the other main characters is Eunice, who is a much younger partner of Lenny.

And Lenny is a writer and a reader and he has actual physical books, which is a bit of a gauche thing to have in that world.

And they smell bad and they smell musty.

And, you know, not to spoil too much of any of the book, but at the end when some of their communication with each other has been discovered by others...