Praise for The Possessed

“In her comic, poignant, beguiling book, Batuman succeeds marvelously in illuminating her version of love.” —Reese Kwon, Virginia Quarterly Review

“At every step along the way, Batuman’s observations are wonderfully vivid.” —Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune

“Odd and oddly profound . . . Among the charms of Ms. Batuman’s prose is her fond, funny way of describing the people around her . . . Perhaps Ms. Batuman’s best quality as a writer though—beyond her calm, lapidary prose—is the winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty. She’s the kind of reader who sends you back to your bookshelves with a sublime buzz in your head. You want to feel what she’s feeling.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“It’s not surprising that some people never get over these books, and Batuman, for her part, goes to get a Ph.D. in Russian literature. Meanwhile, she travels through a country just poignant and absurd enough to showcase her capacious sense of humor (which has room for Isaac Babel, romantic mishaps, and missing luggage) . . . The main attraction is Elif Batuman herself.” —Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine

“Hilarious, wide-ranging, erudite, and memorable, The Possessed is a sui generis feast for the mind and the fancy, ants and all. And, unlikely though this may sound, by the time you’ve reached the end, you just may wish that you, like the author, had fallen down the rabbit hole of comp lit grad school. Batuman’s exaltations of Russian literature could have ended up in scholarly treatises gathering dust in university stacks. Instead, she has made her subject glow with the energy of the enigma that drew her to it in the first place.” —Liesel Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review

“A hugely entertaining mix of scholarly  spelunking . . . and subtle personal revelation . . . Batuman, a gifted and almost painfully funny raconteur, encounters literary royalty and astronomer kings, as well as many epically borderline personalities who attend academic conferences. As it turns out, investigating how the lives of the masters informed their art leads to the revelation that oftentimes, it’s art that gives shape to life.” —Megan O’Grady, Vogue (“People Are Talking About”)

“While some parts of the essays read like spy thrillers, others are more like episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, with academic stealing one another’s parking spaces and then giving the finger . . . Batuman does what all great essayists do—she fills her readers with a passion for the subject at hand while simultaneously exploring its complexity.” —Simon Van Booy, Bookforum

“Batuman’s audaciously funny debut . . . unravels the language, plots, and personal lives of the country’s greatest writers. Part travelogue, part memoir, this book is ultimately about what happens when an unlikely infatuation becomes a life’s work.” —Kristy Davis, O, The Oprah Magazine

“A good personal-academic essay blends the best qualities of [memoir and literary criticism]: the charm, humor, digressions, and confessions of personal writing with the intelligence, curiosity, and analytical boldness of lit crit. Batuman . . . [gets] the ratios pretty much exactly right.” —Sam Anderson, New York Magazine

“Batuman writes with superb wit . . . There’s something melancholy, as well as beautiful, in using literature not just to illuminate experience but actually to create it. Batuman’s writing waltzes in a space in which books and life reflect each other. The effect is dizzying sometimes, and maybe that’s one of her points; her roving sensibility deliriously encompasses many styles and moods. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their prodigiously gifted love child might have written this book.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“I’m no great partisan of the Russian novel . . . So when I rave to you, dear readers, about Elif Batuman’s hilarious and charming THE POSSESSED, understand that the author has entirely bewitched me despite my relative indifference to her subject. Ten pages in, I already knew I’d read her on pretty much anything. Which is not to say that THE POSSESSED failed to enlighted me about both Russian books and the people who adore them . . . I’m hooked.” —Laura Miller, Salon

“A deeply funny, fiercely intelligent portrait of the not-always-rational pursuit of knowledge. Though Batuman lavishes attention on the specifics of her passion—and may indeed inspire you to spend the rest of this winter holed up with a thick Russian novel—her book is really about the process of learning itself. It’s a relatable, absorbing account of what it feels like to be infatuated with ideas, and to let them lead you to ever more weird and wonderful places.” —Eryn Loeb, Time Out New York

“The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, THE POSSESSED is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.” —David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times (Faces to Watch in 2010)

“Wonderfully grotesque, like a cross between Borges and Borat . . . Shows how the life of literary scholarship is really lived