The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure is the New York Times bestselling author and Professor Gary Shteyngart's first collection of essays—despite having appeared in Best American Essays nine times.
An award-winning novelist and memoirist, Shteyngart is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic. The Sensualist collects his most electric pieces in pursuit of the sublime and the absurd in what Simon Rich, author of Glory Days, called "more than just a hedonistic travelogue."
Across the essays, Shteyngart chases capybaras, joins 7,500 fellow passengers on the biggest cruise ship on the seas, and schleps around New York City in search of the best martini. He visits wool merchants and tailors in pursuit of the perfect blue suit. He travels to Naples, Bombay, Havana, and Beijing. He sits on his porch in upstate New York. He puts down his phone and looks up at the stars.
A "sensualist," Shteyngart points out, is not a glutton and certainly not a snob, but someone who believes the details of one's life are always worth savoring. Said Rich: "The Sensualist is a rousing call to arms, a reminder to wring as much joy out of life as you can, and to stop clutching your pearls, unless pearls are your thing, in which case, go nuts."
Roz Chast, staff cartoonist for The New Yorker, author of Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York, and certified funny person, called the collection "a hilarious and heartfelt ode to joy…a reminder that we are human beings and not life-optimizing, productivity-maxxing robots mixing tablespoons of protein powder into fat-free plain yogurt."
Shteyngart—who has been described by The New York Times as "one of his generation's most exhilarating writers"—was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His memoir, Little Failure (Random House, 2014), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was selected as one of the best books of the year by over 45 news magazines and journals around the world. Shteyngart is also the author of the novels Our Country Friends (Random House, 2021); Lake Success (Random House, 2018); Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, 2010), which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by over 40 news journals and magazines around the world; Absurdistan (Random House, 2006), chosen as one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time; and The Russian Debutante's Handbook (Riverhead, 2002), winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Shteyngart's work has been translated into 29 languages, and his fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.
The Sensualist: Adventures in Pure Pleasure is available now for preorder from Random House in hardcover, paperback, audio, and ebook.
