If you looked out at the Port of Miami at sunset on January 27, you would’ve seen the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever built, setting off on its inaugural journey to a salvo of fireworks. And if you looked even closer, you might have seen Gary Shteyngart: the novelist, humorist, and, for the next seven nights, hapless voyager in a “Daddy’s Little Meatball” shirt—thrust into an unfamiliar world of waterslides, $100,000 zirconia-encrusted chalices, and vicious status competition aboard a nearly 250,000-ton behemoth.
No cruise in history compares to the Icon of the Seas, and no author documents the experience quite like Shteyngart.
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