Gary Shteyngart: The Sensualist

Overview

Gary Shteyngart returns for a hilarious, globe-trotting conversation about The Sensualist, his first collection of personal essays — an exuberant case for squeezing more pleasure out of being alive.

One of our funniest chroniclers of contemporary life, Gary Shteyngart has spent years pursuing the pleasures of the sublime and the ridiculous, often discovering they’re the same thing. In The Sensualist, he searches New York City for the perfect martini; joins 7,500 passengers aboard the world’s largest cruise ship; pursues the perfect blue suit; travels from Naples to Bombay, Havana to Beijing; goes looking for capybaras; and, occasionally, sits quietly on his porch and looks at the stars. The result is a book that is, as Roz Chast puts it, “a hilarious and heartfelt ode to joy.”

Behind the adventures is an unexpectedly resonant question: have we forgotten how to enjoy the world we actually live in? For Shteyngart, being a sensualist isn’t about extravagance or connoisseurship. It’s about finding delight in details, absurdity in everyday life, and reasons to look up from our phones.

Hear Shteyngart in a conversation about the nature of good taste, martinis and menswear, technology and distraction, and his pursuit of the increasingly elusive art of having a good time. At a moment when our attention is endlessly being pulled elsewhere, The Sensualist makes a funny, generous proposition: the world is still full of pleasures great and small.

“The abiding miracle of Shteyngart’s work is that it seems just as timely as a Shouts & Murmurs gag in this week’s New Yorker while staying fixed to the timeless absurdity of human life. That dexterity speaks to the range of his sympathy and the depth of his attention.” — Ron Charles