The Possessed
Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS
No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature.
Batuman's subsequent pieces―for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books―…
$27.00
March 14, 2017
Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
Either/Or
Elif Batuman
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
The Idiot
Elif Batuman
The Possessed
Elif Batuman
The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World...
David Graeber; edited by Nika Dubrovsky; foreword by Rebecca Solnit
Memories of Distant Mountains
Orhan Pamuk
The Position of Spoons
Deborah Levy
Making Love with the Land
Joshua Whitehead
A Book of Days
Patti Smith
Nowhere, Exactly
M.G. Vassanji
Some of My Best Friends
Tajja Isen
Burning Questions
Margaret Atwood
Care Of
Ivan Coyote
Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology
Various; Edited by Jordan Abel and Carleigh Baker
A Guest at the Feast
Colm Tóibín
A Private Spy
John le Carré; edited by Tim Cornwell
Languages of Truth
Salman Rushdie
Letters of Note: Grief
Compiled by Shaun Usher