Lit City


	Book Review - Little Failure: A Memoir by Aidan Quinn
	“On most days,” Gary Shteyngart muses in his new memoir, Little Failure, “I have my head so far up my family’s ass I can taste yesterday’s borscht.” The elder Shteyngarts have reservations about their son examining the familial colon, snapping pics with his Google Glass. “Just don’t write like a self-hating Jew,” his father tells him. But readers—whether savvy to the Shteyn or longtime poseurs and would-be initiates hoping to allay the insecurity they feel while nodding, gently aerating their Chardonnay, and pretending to have read The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, or Super Sad True Love Story during chit-chat at all the right parties—will find out that this isn’t such an unsavory prospect, after all. Shteyngart takes this lower-intestinal beet-based multisensory memory stew and distills it into a provoking, illuminating, and laugh-out-loud trip through the life of an immigrant, an author, a neurotic, and—of course—a failure.
	Keeping Your Resolution to Write More in 2014 by Emily Penna
	The new year has now come and gone and, if you’re anything like most writers, you may find yourself already struggling to keep your resolution to write more. One strategy that keeps writers motivated to keep writing, revising, editing, and rewriting is to identify a concrete goal. If you’re seeking such a goal, you’re in luck: Just Buffalo Literary Center has an idea.

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