If anyone can pull off the role of satirical, socio-political prophet and shnooky belletrist, it’s Gary Shteyngart. The author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, Shteyngart is one of the punchiest and funniest young novelists out there. His writing, colored and coarsened by the blunt cynicism of his 1970s upbringing in the Soviet Union, draws on intricate tessellations of classic Russian literature, self-deprecating Semitic humor, and current global politics. Being a Jew born in 1972 in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union and having immigrated to Queens in 1979, he has achieved status as a perpetual outsider, who can observe from remove and criticize with greater perspicacity.
by Max Kenneth on
Out of all the streets in the world stretching from Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg to Lombard Street in San Francisco, I have spent the most time traversing Witherspoon and Nassau here in my hometown of Princeton, watching the dynamic of businesses, the ebb and flow of success and decline.
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When I meet Howard Nuer ’07, a Hassidic Jewish student, three Sundays ago in his room, I am struck most by his bookshelf—filled to the gills with advanced math books and Hebrew scripture. The math major sits relaxed at his … Read More
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It takes an impresario to found a Russian movement. But for a moment’s continued interest in the present, a queer and inexplicable slavophilia must appear to have its dance with history. And now, 15 years after the fall of the … Read More
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That I spent the first 13 years of my life living with a Jamaican woman is always striking to those who best know me. Seldom, I suppose, is the topic broached in casual parley. So when I reveal I have … Read More
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Rabbi Eitan Webb, when I come to interview him early last Wednesday in his Nassau Street apartment, is juggling with ease five things at once. The sun rages to highlight red flourishes in his beard and the car beeps become louder as the Princeton Borough awakens, but he is preparing to have some thirty students over for Passover seder, arranging to have a Matzah Ball party with a middle weight boxing champion, balancing his son on his lap, updating the Chabad website, and fingering an official letter from President Shirley Tilghman.
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Cocksure I stand that this lesbian play has become the first theatrical hit to reach Princeton this school year.
How fine it is to go to the theater and find yourself in a proper Boston living room, replete with pomp and circumstance. But take this turn of the 20th century propriety and subvert it with the sexual lewdness of nowadays; mix in marital deceit and seduction of a young lass by a voluptuous lesbian, and you’ll get the formula for David Mamet’s Boston Marriage, the first play of the Theatre Intime season.
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Just walk in Micawber Books, now as it phases out its inventory in preparation to close its doors in March, and you will undoubtedly bear witness to a sad scene, not quite of mourning but of definite melancholy, downtrodden emotion. Yes, of course, the friendly staff is still smiling; Bobbie Fishman, a long-time employee, interestedly asks what I need help finding, but there is a somber air looming over the store: the shelves in the used-book section have been disassembled and piled in orderly disarray, the stacks in the new-books section increasingly reveal empty wood as customers continue to remove the books and buy them at heavily discounted prices.
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Jed Peterson ’06 has created an epic version of the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet – so creative and grand that his remains the best Shakespeare performed at Princeton in the past few years and the best play … Read More
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Bereavement can be rather grave in certain circumstances, and the loss of decorum- the circumstance I address this very instant- has its sufficient fill of seriousness.
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A French damsel and I decided to take a train To New York to see the Gates and be at play. You were late to the Dinky and had to book It to meet me by the stop to pause, … Read More
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For a kid with a fear of the dark, public bathrooms, flying, and dying alone, I embarked intrepidly on a transatlantic cruise that mirrored the intended route of the ill-fated Titanic of 1912 from port at Southampton to New York … Read More
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