The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.
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Posts Tagged: Elif Batuman
Notable Online: 2/7–2/13
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Notable NYC: 8/31–9/6
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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A Correspondence: On the Humanity of Literature
If literature functions as a mirror of the world, why was it that some of us weren’t being reflected at all?
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Our Beautiful Fragility: A Conversation with Lisa Locascio
Lisa Locascio discusses her debut novel, OPEN ME.
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Notable NYC: 7/14–7/20
Literary events in and around New York City this week!
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Notable San Francisco: 6/20–6/26
Literary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
...moreNotable Los Angeles: 2/26–3/4
Literary events and readings in and around L.A. this week!
...moreNotable Portland: 2/22–2/28
Literary events and listings in and around Portland this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 2/17–2/23
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 2/10–2/16
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 1/20–1/26
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 1/6–1/12
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 10/7–10/13
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
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What to Read When You’ve Made It More Than Halfway through 2017
A list of Rumpus editors’ favorite reads from 2017 thus far—books that have kept us sane, challenged us to work harder and think bigger, and kept us dreaming and hopeful.
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What to Read When You Want to Go to College
College is a rite of passage for many young people, and it’s also a part of the American Dream for many families. Here is a list of books that tackle those fraught four years.
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Language Is All Convention: Talking with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman discusses her new novel The Idiot, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language.
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Living Outside the Narrative in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
The Idiot dramatizes the alienation, and even heartbreak, of losing the narrative thread of your existence.
...moreNotable NYC: 4/1–4/7
Saturday 4/1: Paolo Javier and Jill Magi join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 4/2: Robin Myers and translator Ezequiel Zaidenwerg discuss Conflations. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 5:30 p.m., free. Monday 4/3: Fiona Maazel, Alissa Nutting, Robert Lopez, Lance Olsen, and April Ayers Lawson join the Franklin Park Reading Series. Franklin Park, 8 […]
...moreNotable NYC: 12/10–12/16
Saturday 12/10: Mike Albo, Sandra Bauleo, Alexander Chee, Marcy Dermansky, Natalie Diaz, Elif Batuman, Angela Flournoy, Jill Hennessy, Alice Sola Kim, Téa Obreht, Rosie Schaap, Elissa Schappell, Parul Sehgal, Jamil Smith, Rob Spillman, Emma Straub, Peter Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, Marie-Helene Bertino, Ted Dodson, Chinelo Okparanta, Lisa Lucas and others read from Charles Dicken’s A […]
...moreRepressed Reading
That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? Why? And, more to the point, how? How do you approach literature when you find it racist or elitist? Starting from her teaching experience, Elif Batuman tries to answer that question […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Women in Clothes
The Rumpus speaks to Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton about Women in Clothes, a new collection of essays and art on the intricacies of femininity and clothing choices.
...moreA Whole Jar of Change
Make your way to The New Yorker, where Elif Batuman makes an inquiry into what has become a dominant American disposition: awkwardness. “Awkwardness,” Batuman argues, “is the consciousness of a false position.” Here is the top-rated definition of awkward in Urban Dictionary: “Passing a homeless person on your way to a Coin Star machine.” In […]
...moreElif Batuman Makes “Allopatric Speciation” Interesting
You’d think an essay about Franco Moretti, morphology, and the diminution of classic novels to “five tiny dots in the graph of Figure 2” would be academic and sawdust-dry. Not in the hands of Elif Batuman, who brings her wry humor and quiet appreciation of human absurdity to just such an essay in n + 1 without […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them combines genres to tell stories about Batuman’s adventures as a graduate student.
...moreDrunk Book Buying
“The number of books I buy while sober is, I have noticed, inversely proportional to the number I buy while drunk. It’s a zero-sum game, as Proust once observed of wet dreams: when all the resources are consumed in the night, none are left for waking life.” Elif Batuman on the joys and perils of […]
...moreElitist White People Trying To Make Themselves Feel Better
(Which includes me.) “The workshop’s most famous mantras – ‘Murder your darlings,’ ‘Omit needless words,’ ‘Show, don’t tell’ – also betray a view of writing as self-indulgence, an excess to be painfully curbed in AA-type group sessions. Shame also explains the fetish of ‘craft’: an ostensibly legitimising technique, designed to recast writing as a workmanlike, […]
...moreNotable New York, This Week 6/1 – 6/6
This week in New York Bill Gates talks with his dad, the Joan Rivers documentary screens, Christopher Hitchens talks about his new memoir, Isabella Rossellini talks to Leonard Lopate, KGB Bar holds a Fiction/Poetry slam, and Crispin Glover gives a unique slideshow presentation and screening. TUESDAY 6/1: Isabella Rossellini talks with Leonard Lopate. 92Y. 8:15pm. […]
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
What better way to spend a beautiful spring morning than with a mimosa, the sun on your face, and Rumpus Books?
...moreFrom Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.
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