Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman

United States

About

Elif Batuman is an American novelist, essayist, and journalist of Turkish heritage, celebrated for her sharp humour, intellectual curiosity, and observations of modern life. She studied at Harvard University and earned a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Since 2010, she has been a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about literature, culture, and travel. Her debut nonfiction book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. The Idiot, her first novel, was published in 2017 and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. She continued Selin’s story in Either/Or (2022), further exploring literature, desire, and the search for identity.

Books on TheBookRoads

1
Either/Or
Either/Or
It’s 1996, and Harvard sophomore Selin Karadağ is determined to turn her life into something worthy of a novel. Still trying to make sense of her complicated feelings for Ivan, the elusive Hungarian student she fell for the previous year, Selin turns to literature and philosophy for answers about love, desire, and how to live. Inspired by her reading of Kierkegaard and guided by the messy experiences of university life, she experiments with sex, relationships, parties, and independence. When she travels to Turkey, the country of her family’s heritage, her understanding of herself begins to shift. Witty, thoughtful, and painfully relatable, Either/Or captures the exhilarating uncertainty of becoming an adult and learning to write your own story.
2022 United States
2
The Idiot
The Idiot
It’s 1995, email is new, and Harvard freshman Selin Karadağ is trying to figure out how language, love, and life actually work. The daughter of Turkish immigrants, she befriends a charismatic Serbian classmate and begins exchanging increasingly mysterious emails with Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics student. When their ambiguous relationship follows her from university to the Hungarian countryside, Selin finds herself navigating first love, cultural misunderstandings, and the bewildering transition to adulthood. Witty, intellectually curious, and quietly moving, The Idiot captures the awkward beauty of becoming yourself when you have no idea who that person might be. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it is a coming-of-age story for readers who think too much and feel more than they can explain.
2017 United States