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. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * 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. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times * A richly suggestive and amusing book. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times * A charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel... triumphal. * Daily Mail * Such an enchanting writer. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Sunday Times *