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Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman (born in 1977, in New York City) is an American author, academic, and journalist. Born in New York to Turkish parents, she grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University, where she taught. Batuman is currently the writer-in-residence at Koç University. While in graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, titled "The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel," is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists. In 2007, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. In February, 2010, she published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which details her experiences as a graduate student. She has also published pieces in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and n+1; her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical." She currently resides in Twin Peaks, San Francisco.

Books

Quotes

Olga Alekseevahas quoted2 years ago
The story had a stilted feel, and yet while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no “went” or “sent,” no intention or causality—just unexplained appearances and disappearances.
Olga Alekseevahas quoted2 years ago
The libraries started giving out plastic bags that said A WET BOOK IS NOT A DEAD DUCK on the side. These bags were supposed to encourage you not to throw out wet books.
Aliza Ishaqhas quoted2 years ago
each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back.
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