“The Possessed.” “The Idiot.” Do you see a pattern here? What’s next — “Crime and Punishment?” “Notes From Underground?” “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman’s long-awaited fiction debut, follows “The Possessed” ...

With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection “The Possessed,” Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st century’s great love letters to reading. Ostensibly orbiting an academic ...

Since childhood, Elif Batuman has been on a quest to find in literature “direct relevance to lived experience, especially to love.” Following her doctoral dissertation at Stanford, which explored how ...

The title of Elif Batuman’s debut novel “The Idiot” echoes that of a certain classic by Dostoyevsky, and Batuman’s work does contain many nods to Russian literature. But perhaps more significant is ...

Early in Elif Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book, “The Possessed,” she describes her disillusionment, as a would-be novelist, with “the transcendentalist New England culture of ‘creative ...

Elif I. Batuman ’99 paused as she read from her new collection of autobiographical essays, “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” At a passing reference to the ...

Elif Batuman teaches at Stanford University, and her first book of essays, “The Possessed,” dances between autobiography, travel-writing and literary criticism with dazzling flair and originality.

Lilah Raptopoulos Almost immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, a rift opened up about what to do about Russian culture. On the one hand, cultural institutions wanted to show that they ...