Gary Shteyngart

It's Eunice who is considered like the great writer and she is internet addled.

Everybody is texting on a service called Global Teens, which is very funny.

But I actually thought that too, when you're reading it, her writing is much more, in a way, vivid because it is less self-conscious, right?

You can read Lenny writing to be read.

I mean, there's nothing worse than reading the journal entries of somebody who wrote a journal, hoping somebody would one day read their journal entries.

And you can, I mean, those get released a lot.

Oh my God, that's half of literature.

And there's a lot of life there.

in the writing that comes without that self-consciousness.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's, you know, this is, sorry, I keep talking about the craft of writing, but hopefully listeners won't mind, but it's this idea, you know, when we start teaching a workshop,

What I'm looking for in the first paragraph, the first page, the first chapter, is a sense that there's a really active voice that's unlike any other voice I've read before, and that has something to declare that's so desperate to declare.

They need to do this or they won't survive in some ways.

That's maybe overstating the case, but some sense of that kind of, you know, call me Ishmael.

You know, you can't look away from that.

And yeah, Lenny's voice, Lenny is almost in some ways a kind of, he thinks of himself as being very literary.

He's actually not a writer per se, but he thinks of himself as journaling a lot.

And so a lot of what he writes is very much meant for a certain kind of

It's meant for a certain kind of Brooklyn reader or Brookline mass reader, let's say.

Whereas Eunice is... What I loved about writing Eunice was that Eunice was... She wrote in this completely global teen's way.