The Sensualist: Essays on Pure Pleasure

The first collection of personal essays, each a delightfully hilarious pursuit of the sublime and the absurd, from the New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends and Vera, or Faith 'Gary Shteyngart keeps getting better' Literary Review'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' Washington Post In an age of billionaire ascetics and Silicon Valley self-optimizers, international bestselling author Gary Shteyngart instead proposes pleasure. Not self-improvement, no five-year plan - just paying glorious, greedy attention to the world directly in front of you. That's the spirit behind The Sensualist, which collects Shteyngart's most intoxicating essays on the art of living well: he goes on a worldwide quest to pet a capybara, embarks on a martini crawl across New York, and journeys from Milan to Tokyo in pursuit of the perfect blue suit. He puts down his phone and looks up at the stars. Funny, moving and quietly philosophical, The Sensualist makes the case that the things money can't buy - friendship, living in the moment - have become quiet acts of political resistance, and teaches us to appreciate the joys of life, no matter what.