PositiveJewish CurrentsShteyngart offers us a timely exploration of American commonplaces made unfamiliar by summer heat and political strife ... Only for a nanosecond does Shteyngart—having sustained a novel’s worth of reflections about America without his usual patina of Soviet Jewishness—tease at the characters of his former oeuvre ... Yet, there are good reasons to read Lake Success in light of Shteyngart’s earlier fiction ... In Lake Success, Shteyngart makes a leap from these exaggerated post-socialist landscapes and plunges us into the brutal reality hidden in plain sight right here in the US of A ... It feels exaggerated only ever so slightly—as if by a skilled satirist—and reveals that which America has been all along.
Boris Fishman
MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksIn Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo, Boris Fishman — even if he can’t quite break free of the meta-fictional Mishkin looking over his shoulder — tries courageously to tell a story that is different. The fact that he largely succeeds, and that he worries, in the text, about the ways in which he doesn’t, are promising developments for Fishman as a novelist, and for Russian-American fiction as a whole.
