If there is one word to describe Elif Batuman's new novel The Idiot, it's the word "mundane." And that just might be the novel's greatest strength. The book follows the year in the life of Selin, a ...

Elif Batuman's novel The Idiot superficially reads as a bright undergraduate's intellectual autobiography about her first love. But really, it's about the ways language structures and distorts the way ...

“The Possessed.” “The Idiot.” Do you see a pattern here? What’s next — “Crime and Punishment?” “Notes From Underground?” “The Idiot,” Elif Batuman’s long-awaited fiction debut, follows “The Possessed” ...

In 2023, I became convinced that my life was exactly like “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman ’99. Some book lovers choose to identify with witty Austenian heroines, Joycean everymen, or tortured Russian ...

Harvard in 1995 looked a little different from Harvard today. Email had just became a consistently used medium of communication, cellphones barely existed, and college courses were different. But some ...