The Morning News today posted an interview with super-acclaimed Super Sad Love Story novelist Gary Shteyngart in which the “very tired” Manhattan writer opines on taking Atavan to sleep, his favorite season of “The Wire,” and why the information age is dooming us.
“The society we live in is so stressful,” he said. “Civilization is getting worse and worse and worse. All this useless data.”
This fear, however, does not stop Shteyngart from leaving the novelist’s prized mark of identity on the era’s electronic vessels — as long as they contain his novel, that is.
GS: In [Super Sad Love Story] I deal with something that to me is even worse than the political and economic calamity, and that is the possibility that we are entering a post-literate age. The thing I value the most, which is literature, ever marginalized, sidelined. I have been on this [book] tour and it has really wonderful. People have been coming out and having me sign their Kindles—
RB [The Morning News]: Sign their Kindles?
GS: Yeah, and their iPads.
Perhaps it’s time for the Gary Shteyngart iPad app, then? We can easily imagine Absurdistan as an Angry Birds-style game. We already know he owns an iPhone, so perhaps an app is already in the making.
