Gary Shteyngart at RolfPotts.com

This July at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose essays for Travel + Leisure were selected for the 2006 and 2007 editions of The Best American Travel Writing. Here are some of the highlights from our Q&A:

• “I’m primarily a novelist. That’s my main bread and butter. But the travel writing is very important to me, because it gets me out of the house. I still believe that writers need to see the world to understand their own place in it.”
• “I’ve been writing since I was a kid in Russia. My grandma paid me in little pieces of cheese for every page I wrote. That’s how you create a writer. By paying him or her with something edible.”
• “I like some of Paul Theroux’s writing and I find that fiction is often the most helpful. Aleksander Hemon, for example, who writes a lot about Yugoslavia is brilliant. Oh, and George Saunders’ piece about Dubai is the most hilarious thing ever written.”
• “Life is short and our planet is finite. What can be more important than seeing the totality of the human condition in this awful and wonderful world of ours?”

Full Gary Shteyngart interview online here.