The Idiot

I loved it and could have read a thousand more pages of it. It presented this almost moment-by-moment experience of life, in a way that I just felt Batuman had so much control. There’s so much wit and pleasure in her writing you feel very comfortable being in the world she’s created. – Emma Cline, author of THE GIRLS
Elif Batuman is a writer whose byline creates a flutter of anticipation… If a dominant mode of her generation is knowing introspection, she writes with a bewildered outrospection that delights in the bathetic and the absurd… It’s a novel about being young and stupid that’s both wise and clever — and it’s a treat. * Evening Standard *
Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman; one more fascinated with what’s going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what s going on inside her. – Sheila Heti, author of HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE? and TICKNOR
Each paragraph is a small anthology of well-made observations… Batuman has a rich sense of the details of human attachment and lust. – Dwight Garner * New York Times *
Beautifully written… a wry, funny coming-of-age story set at the dawn of email among a group of Harvard brainiacs too nerdy and self-involved to even think about sex, drugs and drinking. * Daily Mail *
[A] masterfully funny debut novel… Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman. – Sloane Crosley * Vanity Fair *
Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I’ve read in years. – Mary Karr, author of THE ART OF MEMOIR and IT CHOOSES YOU
A moving, continent-hopping coming-of-age story. * Observer, 2017 Books of the Year *
Often wonderful, frequently hilarious… full of zingy one-liners and arch, deflationary observations about the absurdities of academia and adolescence… * Financial Times *
I’m not Turkish, I don’t have a Serbian best friend, I’m not in love with a Hungarian, I don’t go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down. – Miranda July, author of THE FIRST BAD MAN and IT CHOOSES YOU

ELIF BATUMAN’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. 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.

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