Gary Shteyngart | Super Sad True Love Story video trailer | Author who can't read

Those of us aware of Jordan/Katie Price might not find it all that funny an idea that an author can't actually read. But Gary Shteyngart, who wrote one of the best books of the last year or so in Super Sad True Love Story, somehow makes the gag work.

There's been some great work done on making this quality little video trailer. And it's not his first for the title, either. Question is, does it make you want to buy the book?

Super Sad True Love Story in Glasgow

I thought Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story was a hilarous, brilliant book when I read it last year. In fact, it's one of those novels that seems to grown in stature as time goes on (and other books disappoint).

Set in a near future New York, it depicts a society being torn apart by a financial crisis clearly related to the one we've just experienced. A broken United States of America is being ruled over by an authoritarian coalition (no really), having been credit crunched into a state of revolution. It is a society in which technology - in the shape of highly evolved iPhones called Apparats - dictates not just how we work but how we date and socialise too. Facebook isn't just a social networking tool, it is the social network.

Shteyngart takes the iPhone generation and twists it. There are some gloriously irreverent features to the book. His anti-hero works for a company promising eternal youth (it's a hollow promise, but such companies already exist). The fashion of the day is dominated by 'onion skin' jeans... think transparent leggings. His world is one in which the sex war has been fought and lost on many battlefields and retail parkchanging rooms.

This is a very funny writer dealing with a topic that is highly prescient. I interviewed him over the phone last September and you can read the piece here - posted in an earlier blog. Now he is coming to Glasgow, so if any of you fancy a really interesting Saturday afternoon go and check him out on the Aye Write website.