Promotional Information

A witty, brilliant treatise on reading Russian literature

About the Author

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humour, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her novel, The Idiot, was published in 2017.

Reviews

Wildly original, creatively rambling... the funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter
*The Times*

Dazzlingly good ... very bookish, very clever and very funny ... [The Possessed is] a preposterously engaging volume
*Sunday Telegraph*

The highest compliment you can pay such a book is that it sends you back to the original authors refreshed. I can go one higher - I found myself simply wanting to read more from Elif Batuman
*Evening Standard*

An intoxicating mix of travel memoir, autobiography, literary criticism and philosophy... charming and hilarious
*Daily Telegraph*

Deeply clever and very funny
*Guardian*

Elif Batuman seems at home in that borderland between tragedy and comedy the great Russian writers colonised. The Possessed is insightful, poignant and very funny
*James Meek*

Wise and delightfully funny
*Rachel Polonsky*

Charming, complex and life-enhancing
*Sunday Times*

Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable
*New York Times Book Review*

Odd and oddly profound ... she's the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she's feeling. It's tempting to keep quoting her book forever
*New York Times*

A vividly engaging travelogue-cum-memoir ... Batuman is an astute observer with a terrific sense of humour and immense bravado
*Irish Times*

Batuman's refreshingly unlikely memoir recounts how she decided to devote her life to studying the great Russian novelists ... the result is the funniest book you're ever likely to read about Russian fiction
*Sunday Times*

The Possessed weaves anecdotes and literary criticism around Batuman's tales of her adventures in America, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Russia ... In some complicated way, this is a book about the relationship between art and life. But it's also a simple book about the relationship between art and life. Or, rather, it's a complicated book about the simple relationship between the two. In the end, all memoirs tend to end up as a defence of something. Batuman's is a defence of reading as a form of living
*Guardian*

An eccentric, funny and always perceptive account of the authors long time immersion in the classics of Russian literature
*Observer*

I loved Batuman's quirky and perceptive account of her passion for Russian literature ... A move away from objective criticism towards the personal and what books actually mean to people, it is hugely appealing
*Sunday Herald*

Told in nimble and often funny prose
*Guardian*

Batuman's very different sentimental education is a wryly brilliant portrait of herself as a young Turkish intellectual emerging among American and Uzbek Russianists and rogues
*New Statesman*