A pitch perfect encapsulation of one young woman's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood
In 1996, Selin, the bookish, language-obsessed daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard University for her second year. Having spent the summer teaching English in the Hungarian countryside while obsessing over her crush, Ivan, Selin is determined to untangle from her unrequited infatuation, and shed her first year innocence. With her English syllabus as a rough guide, and her more worldly and confident peers as instructors, she resolves to become her own main character and throws herself into undergrad life- joining the literary magazine, attending house parties, and taking it into her own hands to spark her sexual awakening.
A Russophile at heart and set on getting herself - and her improving Russian-language skills - to the motherland, Selin takes a paying summer job with the student-run guidebook, but is sent not to a different or exotic locale, but, disappointingly, Turkey. But the Turkey of her childhood trips quickly takes on new and rich meaning, as Selin travels from city to city, absorbing the land of her ancestors. She meets people on her way, men who reveal new parts of herself and others who heighten the contradictions she sees in the world around her. Every moment becomes an opportunity to seize the day, to move away from others' expectations and towards a life of her own making.
With great observation, wit, and empathy, Elif Batuman perfectly captures the mystifying uncertainties to be found at the cusp of adulthood. Filled with the mundanities alongside the comedy of youth, and as entertaining as it is intellectual, Either/Or captures a forging of a self, and is a wonderfully complex illustration of a woman finding the freedom to step outside the script.
A pitch perfect encapsulation of one young woman's quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood
In 1996, Selin, the bookish, language-obsessed daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives at Harvard University for her second year. Having spent the summer teaching English in the Hungarian countryside while obsessing over her crush, Ivan, Selin is determined to untangle from her unrequited infatuation, and shed her first year innocence. With her English syllabus as a rough guide, and her more worldly and confident peers as instructors, she resolves to become her own main character and throws herself into undergrad life- joining the literary magazine, attending house parties, and taking it into her own hands to spark her sexual awakening.
A Russophile at heart and set on getting herself - and her improving Russian-language skills - to the motherland, Selin takes a paying summer job with the student-run guidebook, but is sent not to a different or exotic locale, but, disappointingly, Turkey. But the Turkey of her childhood trips quickly takes on new and rich meaning, as Selin travels from city to city, absorbing the land of her ancestors. She meets people on her way, men who reveal new parts of herself and others who heighten the contradictions she sees in the world around her. Every moment becomes an opportunity to seize the day, to move away from others' expectations and towards a life of her own making.
With great observation, wit, and empathy, Elif Batuman perfectly captures the mystifying uncertainties to be found at the cusp of adulthood. Filled with the mundanities alongside the comedy of youth, and as entertaining as it is intellectual, Either/Or captures a forging of a self, and is a wonderfully complex illustration of a woman finding the freedom to step outside the script.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed- Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
Our funniest overthinker - and the queen of the campus novel...
Selin is a droll and disarming narrator, and takes her place as one
of the finest hapless scholars in the literary canon.
*Sunday Times*
Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the
benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were . . . This
novel wins you over in a million micro-observations.
*The New York Times*
A richly suggestive and amusing book.
*Financial Times*
Such an enchanting writer.
*Sunday Times*
Either/Or is both an entertaining campus novel and an engaging
disquisition on the very nature and purpose of novels.
*Financial Times, *Summer Reads of 2022**
Stupendous . . . hilarious... Batuman is a genius, rendering human
folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal
*Vogue*
The central pleasure of reading Elif Batuman's ferociously
intelligent fiction...[is] the thrill of encountering things you
already half-knew, rendered in language with lyrical precision...
hopefully, there will be a third installment of the adventures of
Elif Batuman's brilliantly modern picaro.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Wonderfully idiosyncratic... Charming
*Guardian*
Delightful... Batuman has a formidable deadpan wit... Selin is not
only an astute observer but displays a touching capacity for
awe.
*Spectator*
A charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel...
triumphal.
*Daily Mail*
Either/Or is an astute and very amusing read, packed with pin-sharp
observations delivered in a deadpan style.
*i*
Selin, the magnetic protagonist in Batuman's brilliant and comedic
first novel, The Idiot (2017), returns . . . Selin reads and
ponders the human condition, culminating in a breath-catching
ending that will leave spellbound readers hoping for more from
Batuman's bright and witty adventurer of conscience.
*Booklist (starred review)*
[A] charming, smart and completely idiosyncratic take on art, life
and the gap between.
*Daily Mail, *Books to Look Out For 2022**
One of the most convincing fictional descriptions of overwhelming
despair I have read... Batuman... [has] extraordinary control of
the narrative voice.
*London Review of Books*
Effervescent . . . Observant, defiant, and newly on
antidepressants, Selin approaches the mystery of human relations
with a beginner's naivete and sharp intelligence . . . Batuman's
light touch and humor are brought to bear on serious questions . .
. As accomplished as The Idiot was, this improves upon it, and
Batuman's already sharp chops as a novelist come across as even
more refined in these pages. Readers will be enraptured.
*Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
A brilliant meditation on womanhood and identity. By turns
hilarious and illuminating.
*Irenosen Okojie*
What elevates this far above the typical campus novel is Ms.
Batuman's wry perspective . . . Selin's observations are frequently
hilarious, sometimes touching and always original . . . There's
both a sweet innocence and a sophisticated meta aspect to all this,
a level on which Either/Or is about how Selin (and her creator)
came to create the very book we're reading . . . [A] charming,
hyper-literary novel . . . To be continued, we hope.
*Wall Street Journal*
Batuman, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New Yorker writer, brings
delicious detail and light irony to her heroine's quest.
*Oprah Daily, “The 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2022”*
Either/Or is driven by intellectual questions: it's a novel of
ideas narrated by a protagonist who, even in her misery, is
delightful company.
*Literary Review*
Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot, is one of the best works of
fiction published in the 21st century. Her new novel, Either/Or,
picks up where The Idiot left off. . . . Batuman has an extremely
keen sense for what makes characters engaging and renders it all in
supernaturally observant and funny prose.
*AV Club, “The 15 most-anticipated books of 2022”*
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