Idiot, The (Shortlisted For The Women'S Prize For Fict 2018)

Description: SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018

It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is deter-mined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying psycho-linguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class. She spends the summer in the Hungarian countryside teaching English to village children, where sad and comic misunderstandings ensue. Full of the razor-sharp evocations of character and place that have long delighted readers of Batuman's non-fiction, The Idiot tackles literary ambition, female friend-ship, the American dream, Chomskian linguistics, the Russian novel and romantic love. `There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul,' Proust once wrote, `but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.'

Review: "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 *



Prizes: Short-listed for The London Magazine and Collyer Bristow Book of the Year Prize 2018 (UK).

Author Biography: 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.