Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.
Genres: Literary Fiction
Non fiction
Awards
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Elif Batuman recommends

Eternal Life (2018)
Dara Horn
"Eternal Life takes the psychological novel to places I've never seen before...Riveting, startling, hilarious, and sad--I've never read anything like it."

Convenience Store Woman (2018)
Sayaka Murata
"I picked up this novel on a trip to Japan and couldn’t put it down. A haunting, dark, and often hilarious take on society’s expectations of the single woman. As an extra bonus, it totally transformed my experience of going to convenience stores in Tokyo."

Perfect Tunes (2020)
Emily Gould
"Perfect Tunes is mind-blowing .Full of unspeakable insights, or at least I thought they were unspeakable, but there they are. Now I want everyone I know to read this book and talk about it with me."

True Story (2020)
Kate Reed Petty
"I literally cannot believe this book exists. A mind-blowing, page-turning, un-put-downable, heartwarming, empathetic, formally inventive horror suspense thriller, with a life-affirming and timely feminist message? What? This would be an amazing fifteenth novel for a person to have written and it is Kate Reed Petty's first one. What an incredible talent!"

Detransition, Baby (2021)
Torrey Peters
"Detransition, Baby updates and transcends (trans-scends!) the Sex and the City model, while fully delivering its many satisfactions! ... A noteworthy advance in the history of the novel!"

Lurkers (2021)
Sandi Tan
"A magisterial triumph from the inimitable Sandi Tan, Lurkers is brimming with sinister pathos and dead-on, laugh-out-loud observations."

Mrs. March (2021)
Virginia Feito
"Mrs. March is just the Madame Bovary-meets-Patricia Highsmith feminist psychoanalytic comedy-of-manners thriller that I didn't know I so desperately needed. I almost destroyed my life by staying up so late reading. I am lucky my house is still standing."

The Four Humors (2021)
Mina Seçkin
"Mina Seçkin's brilliant and understated first novel describes a young person's quest to situate herself geographically, culturally, historically, and physiologically--to map out a place for her inner self in the world, in her family, and in her own body. Funny, heartrending, illuminating, informative, brimming with cultural specificity and human universality."

Post-Traumatic (2022)
Chantal V Johnson
"Deeply original, socially important, psychologically revelatory, propulsively and idiosyncratically readable. Post-Traumatic is a gem."

Cult Classic (2022)
Sloane Crosley
"The witty, improbably propulsive rom-com you didn't know you were waiting for - and just the sparkling, slightly sinister love letter to New York City that New York City deserves. An effervescent delight."
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