The Possessed

"Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable."  -  The New York Times Book Review

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

"Wildly original, creatively rambling... the funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter."  -  The Times

Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2010. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humour, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her novel, The Idiot, was published in 2017.