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Bookworm

Elif Batuman: The Possessed

Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up!. And yet she fell passionately in love with literature...

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By Michael Silverblatt • Apr 22, 2010 • 29m Listen

Elif Batuman never intended to study literature, learn Russian,or learn to speak Uzbek. That's no life for a grown up!. And yet she fell passionately in love with literature. In The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) she uses her enormous sense of humor, her intelligence and her robust Turkish ancestry in courting her darlings — the Russian classics.

Read an excerpt from The Possessed.

Banner image: © Mikhail Lemkhin

  • https://images.ctfassets.net/2658fe8gbo8o/AvYox6VuEgcxpd20Xo9d3/769bca4fbf97bf022190f4813812c1e2/new-default.jpg?h=250

    Michael Silverblatt

    host, 'Bookworm'

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    Elif Batuman

    novelist and nonfiction writer "The Idiot;" The New Yorker

    CultureBooksArts
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