About this item
A New York Times Book Review Notable BookFinalist for the Pulitzer Prize for FictionLonglisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction"An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down." - Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You "Easily the funniest book I've read this year." - GQA portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.
About the Author
Elif Batuman is an American author, academic, and journalist. Born in New York City 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, she 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, , which details her experiences as a graduate student. She has also published pieces in , Harper's Magazine, and n 1. Her writing has been described as "almost helplessly epigrammatical. " She resides in Twin Peaks, San Francisco.
