Mark Coggins from San Francisco · CC BY 2.0

Emigrated from Leningrad to Queens at seven and turned the disorientation into comedy, building a body of satirical fiction — The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, Super Sad True Love Story — that mines immigrant ambition and American excess for laughs without softening either. His narrators are usually striving and compromised, and very funny about it. Vera, or Faith and a memoir later turned the same unsparing eye on his own family's story.