Elif Batuman
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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.
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Notable 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,…
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Notable 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,…
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Repressed 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…
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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.
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A 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…
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Elif 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…