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MotherlandBook

by Julia Ioffe

Who uses, recommends or left Motherland, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Gary Shteyngart
recommended

Uh, and the third book is Julia Ioffe's, uh, Motherland, which was a National Book Award finalist, an old friend of mine, also Soviet-born, uh, Moscow to My Leningrad and it's a book about uh, what the Soviet, you know, the Soviet Union was ostensibly this feminist progressive society, but guess what?

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-gary-shteyngart.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-06-19·youtube.com ↗

Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.

The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.

The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.

What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.