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Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
February 2010
On Sale: February 16, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 0374532184
EAN: 9780374532185
Paperback
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Fiction
No one who read Elif Batumanβs first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. βBabel in Californiaβ told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babelβs last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babelβs secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batumanβs subsequent piecesβfor The New Yorker, Harperβs Magazine, and the London Review of Booksβ have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoyβs ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkinβs wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influenceβincluding her own.
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