Gary Shteyngart

Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha stands by him through it all.

A failed Brooklyn writer, Nathan Fisher, visits his ailing parents in Florida. His mother has Alzheimer's and his father has recently had a stroke and his girlfriend has recently broken up with him.

Kaveh and Raul are two b-movie co-writers who have suffered a bitter falling out. Kaveh's lost his girlfriend, and spends his days getting high in his apartment, while Raul is off studying at Columbia University. But when one of their films ("Islama-rama 2") is accepted by a film festival, the two ex-friends are forced to tentatively re-connect in order to pitch their script to the mysterious producer, Yukio Tai (James Hong). Along the way, they will have to brave brutish bodyguards, cutthroat colleagues, inept agents, romantic entanglements, prima donna actors, and the trials of their own bitter friendship.

It began with a botched circumcision: Acclaimed author Gary Shteyngart tells his story of immigration, manhood, and seeking treatment for his physical trauma.

An extremely sensitive young man in Brooklyn goes way too far in his quest to adhere to society's expectations of traditional masculinity.