TALKING HEADS
Dear readers! I am still greatly chagrined about having to miss not only the Chicago reading but also the visit to Redlands University, where I had been enormously looking forward to meeting Alisa Slaughter, Joy Manesiotis (author of a very beautiful and apropos poem about lamenting women), and their students, whom I thank for their interest in The Possessed, and whom I very much hope to meet at some point in the future.
In the meantime, tolerant readers, you may or may not be filled with admiration to learn that I was able to spare a moment from my rigorous program of swamp-related activity in order to deliver a 200-word opinion on the future of evolutionary-psychological literary criticism, for which purpose I temporarily assumed the form of a miniscule talking head:
The original of that tiny photograph was taken by super-chef Musa Dağdeviren and, in its uncropped version, shows me holding a bunch of greens known in Turkish as “snake’s pillow” or “heathen’s beet.”
I write about my encounter with this interesting vegetable in a profile of Musa, which will appear in next week’s New Yorker. They ended up making a lot of cuts, so I’m posting an unexpurgated version of the heathen’s beet incident.
On the subject of the New Yorker piece, I would also like to thank super-journalists Wesley Yang and Suzy Hansen, because Suzy was the one who told Wesley that we should check out Musa’s restaurant, and Wesley was the one who made me go there with him.
I actually tried to mention Mr. Yang by name in the article, but it got cut, along with more than half of the other things I tried to mention in the article. (I, a tireless graphomaniac, wrote 11,000 words, of which 5,200 will be published). Yang was, however, contacted by the super-scrupulous fact-checkers, whom he informed that the single quote attributed, in the final version, to my unnamed “friend”—”it might be heavy cream”—should actually have been: “it might be whipped cream.” Yang and I subsequently had a productive discussion on this important distinction:
Me: Isn’t whipped cream made with heavy cream?
Yang: Yes. But then they whip it.
But OK, dear readers, I had better get back to the dredging and sluicing. The swamp keeps piling up, especially since my entire staff was knocked out last week by what turned out to be a hairball problem, now happily resolved. I think I was working them too hard, and not taking the time to listen to their opinions on the pressing literary issues of our day.
Tags: academic life, animals, author photos, cats, comparative literature, excuses, fact-checking, Friday, graphomania, hope, literary criticism, non-publications, outsourcing, swamps, Turkey
April 8th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
surely whipped cream is made with unwhipped cream? but then again maybe it’s unwhipped in the same sense – apropos of novels and evolution – as that in which a plot unfolds (or thickens), i.e. by having its whippedness whipped out of it.
April 8th, 2010 at 11:46 pm
Hmm… I thought whipped cream is made by cow-whipping Oompa-Loompas.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:49 am
OK that is just weird—I was just writing about Oompa Loompas, in a not-yet-published book review. This is a great new outsourcing idea: if I end up trying to write a novel, I should totally hire a team of whip-bearing subaltern dwarfs to keep the plot thick enough.
April 10th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Bookworm
Elif Batuman
THU APR 22, 2010
Host: Michael Silverblatt
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100422elif_batuman
April 10th, 2010 at 11:10 am
I can tell the picture is a fake because your cat’s grammar is too good.
April 11th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
By way of thanks for The Possessed:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003834.php
Shevchenko in Urum!
April 11th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Audio Slide Show
A Chef in Istanbul
April 19, 2010
This week in the magazine, Elif Batuman writes about the Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren and his restaurant Çiya Sofrasi. “Tapping into a powerful vein of collective food memory, Çiya was producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned,” Batuman writes. Here she describes her reaction to Dağdeviren’s dishes and her memories of her Turkish family. Photographs by Carolyn Drake.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/multimedia/2010/04/19/100419_audioslideshow_batuman
April 11th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
This week in the magazine, Elif Batuman profiles the Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren. Here Batuman talks with Blake Eskin about Dağdeviren’s culinary philosophy, how his food triggers family memories, and why plucking her first turkey made her think of Isaac Babel.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/04/19/100419on_audio_batuman
April 16th, 2010 at 7:50 am
Those Who Wait
By ELIF BATUMAN
Published: April 16, 2010
Mixing and matching elements from three periods of Soviet history, Olga Grushin’s powerful novel keeps characters in line for a concert that may never happen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/books/review/Batuman-t.html
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Bookworm
Elif Batuman THU APR 22, 2010
Host:Michael Silverblatt
Listen to entire show:
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100422elif_batuman
May 2nd, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Stephen Dodson
MY LETTER TO THE TIMES.
I enjoy Elif Batuman’s writing and her take on Russian literature, but
I have a couple of bones to pick with her review of Olga Grushin’s
“The Line” (April 18)
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/003855.php
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/books/review/Letters-t-RUSSIANRELAT_LETTERS.html?ref=review
May 11th, 2010 at 7:26 pm
ABC Radio National
The Book Show
Addicted to the Russian classics: Elif Batuman
Sarah L’Estrange “. . . spoke to Elif Batuman in San Franscisco about The Possessed, and asked her how she became addicted to Russian novels.”
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2010/2897040.htm
May 12th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: a ‘responsive’ interview
May 13, 2010 – 12:03 pm, by Angela Meyer
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/literaryminded/2010/05/13/elif-batuman-author-of-the-possessed-a-responsive-interview/
May 19th, 2010 at 7:06 am
Harper’s Magazine Presents Death: A Literary Celebration of the Bitter End Featuring Joseph O’Neill, Diane Williams, and Elif Batuman
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/harpers-magazine-presents-death-a,1307260.shtml
June 30th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Dear Elif,
As a follower of you blog and a big fan of Ciya I enjoyed your piece on M Dagdeviren in New Yorker. Maybe you and I can collaborate on a piece on decadent Turkish food.
July 12th, 2010 at 2:39 pm
KCRW’s Bookworm
Favorite Books: John Waters and Elif Batuman
http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/31941417
July 12th, 2010 at 6:59 pm
Favorite Books: John Waters and Elif Batuman – Bookworm on KCRW
http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw100708favorite_books_john_
Russian Book recommendations
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Alexander Pushkin: Eugene Onegin
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Isaac Babel: Red Cavalry (includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle plus Babel’s 1920 diary)
Anton Chekov, two plays: Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard; stories: Lady with Lap Dog, A Boring Story, In the Ravine, The Sneeze
Nikoli Gogol: Dead Souls
Ivan Goncharov: Oblomov
Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
Andrey Platonov: The Foundation Pit; Soul
Andrei Bely: Petersberg
July 13th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
My 12-Hour Blind Date, With Dostoevsky
July 13, 2010 | by Elif Batuman
A review in five parts.
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/07/13/my-12-hour-blind-date-with-dostoevsky/
July 14th, 2010 at 8:35 am
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
My 12-Hour Blind Date: The Play Begins
July 14, 2010 | by Elif Batuman
Part two of a four-part review.
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/07/14/my-12-hour-blind-date-the-play-begins/
July 15th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
Back on Planet Dostoevsky
July 15, 2010 | by Elif Batuman
Part three of a four-part review
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/07/15/back-on-planet-dostoevsky/
July 16th, 2010 at 10:31 am
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
The Only Ones Left on the Island
July 16, 2010 | by Elif Batuman
The final installment of a four-part review.
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/07/16/the-only-ones-left-on-the-island/
Tomorrow: The epilogue.
July 19th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
The End of The Date
July 19, 2010 | by Elif Batuman
An epilogue.
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/07/19/the-end-of-the-date/
July 19th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Seductive Banter
In Which I Am Forgiven By Elif Batuman
Ujala Sehgal
http://seductivebanter.wordpress.com/2010/07/19/in-which-i-am-forgiven-by-elif-batuman/
September 3rd, 2010 at 8:01 pm
THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY
Pathologically Shy; Loving The Possessed
September 3, 2010 | by Lorin Stein | File under Ask The Paris Review
I loved Elif Batuman’s book The Possessed. Do you know of any similar books like hers? —Anonymous
I don’t! Lucky for us, Ms. Batuman was kind enough to step in with her own recommendations:
http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/09/03/pathologically-shy-loving-the-possessed/
September 13th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
‘Do you read e-books?’
‘Elif Batuman writes: “Yes, I have a Kindle and e-books have changed my reading habits a lot in the past year. For example, I now buy books almost exclusively while drunk.”’
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/0914/1224278818712.html
September 14th, 2010 at 10:15 am
London Review of Books
Vol. 32 No. 18 · 23 September 2010
pages 3-8 | 8439 words
Get a Real Degree
Elif Batuman
* The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl
Harvard, 480 pp, £25.95, April 2009, ISBN 978 0 674 03319 1
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree
September 22nd, 2010 at 7:03 am
New York Times Magazine
Kafka’s Last Trial
By ELIF BATUMAN
A tale of eccentric heirs, Zionist claims, a cat-infested apartment and a court fight the author would have understood all too well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/magazine/26kafka-t.html
September 27th, 2010 at 4:39 am
Elif Batuman’la Rus Edebiyati
http://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/turkish/highlight/page/id/113696/t/Elif-Batuman-and-Russian-Literature
September 27th, 2010 at 5:01 am
Denis Dutton links to “Kafka’s Last Trial” at Arts and Letters Daily:
http://www.aldaily.com/
“Will the door be opened to Franz Kafka’s last manuscripts? Only the doorkeeper knows. Or does he know? Kafka’s afterlife is a parable, too… more»”
September 30th, 2010 at 4:41 am
Best American Essays 2010 « BREVITY’s Nonfiction Blog
[. . .]
The folks at Essay Daily have been nice enough to post the table of contents of Best American Essays 2010 for those of us still waiting for our copies to arrive. So here goes:
Elif Batuman- The Murder of Leo Tolstoy (Harper’s)
[. . .]
http://brevity.wordpress.com/2010/09/29/best-american-essays-2010/
October 1st, 2010 at 7:54 am
Lowell Humanities Lecture Series: Elif Batuman
http://www.bc.edu/offices/lowellhs/
October 1st, 2010 at 6:30 pm
Buying books is fun, with a glass in your hand
Author, author: Elif Batuman
* Elif Batuman
* The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/02/elif-batuman-ebooks-buying
October 3rd, 2010 at 2:18 am
Bibliophiles
The Boston Globe
A PhD memoirist who shops for books after few nightcaps
Elif Batuman says what makes a book good is that it is compulsively readable.
By Amanda Katz
Globe Correspondent / October 3, 2010
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/10/03/a_phd_memoirist_who_shops_for_books_after_few_nightcaps/
October 20th, 2010 at 11:28 am
Turkish-American Author Visits Boston College
Written by Morgan Chalfant Oct 19, 2010
http://www.thebcobserver.com/2010/10/19/turkish-american-author-visits-boston-college/
November 8th, 2010 at 11:26 am
Jewcy
Arts & Culture
Authors In Conversation: Ben Greenman And Elif Batuman
By Jason Diamond / November 8, 2010
http://www.jewcy.com/arts-and-culture/authors-in-conversation-ben-greenman-and-elif-batuman
November 15th, 2010 at 8:03 am
NaNoWriMo, Writer Resources
‘Everyone Has a Certain Amount of Bad Writing to Get Out of Their System’ : NaNoWriMo Tip #15
By Jason Boog on November 15, 2010 8:22 AM
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/everyone-has-a-certain-amount-of-bad-writing-to-get-out-of-their-system-nanowrimo-tip-15_b16824
December 9th, 2010 at 2:58 pm
Here On Earth: Radio Without Borders
The Possessed
December 08, 2010 Wednesday AT 3PM CT
http://www.wpr.org/hereonearth/archive_101208k.cfm
December 18th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
programme
Winternachten festival 2011
Elif Batuman
participant in
Winternachten Lecture – Tim Parks
Winternacht 1
The Beauty of the Life of the Other
Winternacht 2
The comfort of the bedside table
Wintercafe 2: VPRO De Avonden
http://www.winternachten.nl/winternachten/deelnemerpaginadezeeditie.php?deelnemer_id=1104&editie=10068&taal=engels
December 23rd, 2010 at 5:38 am
Cervantes, Balzac and double-entry bookkeeping
A lecture by Elif Batuman
Monday 21 February, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
When Don Quixote is dubbed a knight – a key moment in the history of the novel – the local innkeeper swears him in on an account book. Balzac is known to have kept on his bookshelf, beside the published edition of his Contes Drolatique (Droll Tales), a black-bound volume titled Comptes Mélancoliques (Melancholy Accounts): a compendium of his debts. What is the secret relationship between double-entry bookkeeping and the novel?
In the story Elif Batuman tells, these two writing practices originate from a single historical moment and a single historical urge: the impossible desire to write at the rate of life itself. Cervantes, who worked for seven years as a bookkeeper for the Spanish Armada, was the first to give novelistic shape to this desire – which Balzac, an erstwhile clerk, experienced perhaps more intensely than any other novelist. This lecture will trace the theme of double-entry in the life and work of these two literary giants.
Elif Batuman, who studied at Harvard and Stanford, has published essays on comic books, Kafka, Samarkand, creative writing programmes and St Petersburg’s ice palace, among other things, in the LRB, the New Yorker, the New York Times and n+1. Her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them, will be out in the spring. She recently won a Whiting Writers Award – past winners include Jorie Graham, David Foster Wallace and Jeffrey Eugenides – and is spending this year in Istanbul.
To purchase tickets please click here
Or call +44 (0)20 7323 8181 – Ticket Desk in Great Court Open 10.00 to 16.45 daily.
The ticket prices are £10 (£8 concessions including LRB subscribers and Friends of the British Museum).
http://www.lrb.co.uk/winterlectures
December 28th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
NYC ARTS > Venues > Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Symphony Space > Listings > Selected Shorts: Russian Tales, Classic and New, with Elif Batuman and Keith Gessen
http://www.nyc-arts.org/events/9765/selected-shorts-russian-tales-classic-and-new-with-elif-batuman-and-keith-gessen
December 28th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
The Goal of Predictions: “Who Am I?” – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com
The Role of ‘Who Am I?”
December 28, 2010
Elif Batuman is the author “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.”
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/12/27/why-do-we-need-to-predict-the-future/the-goal-of-predictions-who-am-i
December 30th, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Faces we watched in 2010: Where they are now | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times
December 30, 2010 | 5:43 pm
[. . .]
Like Skloot, critic Elif Batuman had published short pieces, but 2010 saw the release of her first book. “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” comprises seven essays that merge criticism, personal experience and scholarship. It was singled out as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by both the popular newspaper USA Today and by New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead. Batuman has a knack for tickling the literary zeitgeist: Her review[*] of Marc McGurl’s “The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing” in the London Review of Books launched a fleet of online debates about MFA programs, McGurl’s version and Batuman’s slant on them both.
[. . .]
– Carolyn Kellogg
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/12/faces-we-watched-in-2010.html
=====
* http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n18/elif-batuman/get-a-real-degree
December 31st, 2010 at 11:56 am
Why Criticism Matters – NYTimes.com
From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature
Essay by Elif Batuman
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/books/review/Batuman-t-web.html
January 4th, 2011 at 12:02 pm
Thirteen Things on the Web | HTMLGIANT
January 4th, 2011 / 10:44 am
Random
Kyle Minor
[. . .]
5. Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed, is blogging beautifully at My Life and Thoughts.
[. . .]
http://htmlgiant.com/random/thirteen-things-on-the-web/
January 20th, 2011 at 9:21 am
Judges for the 2011 Tournament of Books
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/the_rooster/the_2011_tournament_of_books.php
January 25th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Show Down! Literary Stars Support Union In Dispute At Harper’s Magazine
Ujala Sehgal | Jan. 25, 2011, 3:53 PM
[. . .]
The 84 names on the list include Zadie Smith, Barbara Ehrenreich, George Saunders, Elif Batuman, William Gass, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte, and Naomi Klein.
They lent their considerable gravitas to call upon [the publisher of Harper's] MacArthur to reconsider the layoffs of [literary editor] Metcalf and [Harper's Index editor] Ross, just a day before the scheduled meeting between MacArthur’s representatives and union officials.
[. . .]
http://www.businessinsider.com/show-down-literary-stars-support-union-in-dispute-at-harpers-magazine-2011-1
February 13th, 2011 at 7:42 am
EVENTS
2/21/11 – London, UK
“Cervantes, Balzac, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping”
London Review of Books Winter Lectures series
The British Museum – BP Theatre, 6:30PM
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/events_calendar/february_2011/balzac,_don_cervantes.aspx
February 13th, 2011 at 7:43 am
Elif Batuman on the double-entry book-keeping of writing « A Cultural Policy Blog
http://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/elif-batuman-on-the-double-entry-book-keeping-of-writing/
February 14th, 2011 at 5:37 am
Elif Batuman and Pavel Basinsky | Southbank Centre.
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/literature-spoken-word/tickets/elif-batuman-and-pavel-basinsky-57420
February 25th, 2011 at 8:39 am
25 February 2011
The Granta blog
Yuka Igarashi
Elif Batuman In Search of Accountable Time
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/batuman
February 25th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
“A history of a kind of novel that uses double-entry bookkeeping as a metaphor for credit and debit between living and writing” – London Review of Books Winter Lecture Series #3: Cervantes, Balzac and Double-Entry Bookkeeping « Bookmunch
Published: February 24, 2011 / 6:48 am
http://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/%E2%80%9Ca-history-of-a-kind-of-novel-that-uses-double-entry-bookkeeping-as-a-metaphor-for-credit-and-debit-between-living-and-writing%E2%80%9D-london-review-of-books-winter-lecture-series-3-cerva/
February 28th, 2011 at 1:11 am
AUDIO
March 7, 2011
Beloved Beşiktaş
A Podcast with Elif Batuman : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/03/07/110307on_audio_batuman
March 2nd, 2011 at 4:20 pm
#197 British Museum LRB Lecture
March 1, 2011
by MrBrown
http://urbanspree.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/197-british-museum-lrb-lecture/
March 9th, 2011 at 5:31 am
Festival Programme 2011 – Elif Batuman & Geoff Dyer
http://www.cuirt.ie/component/option,com_rsevents/Itemid,127/cid,28/layout,invite/view,events/
March 10th, 2011 at 6:15 am
Dani Gill – injecting new energy into Cúirt
Galway Advertiser, March 10, 2011.
By Charlie Mcbride
NEXT MONTH sees the 26th Cúirt International Literature Festival when writers and booklovers from far and wide will converge on Galway from April 12 to 17 , to enjoy this justly fêted celebration of the written word.
[. . .]
“Elif Batuman will be discussing her book, which is also a debut, Possessed – Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. She’s great too! . . . .” [--Dani Gill]
[. . .]
http://www.advertiser.ie/galway/article/37466/dani-gill-injecting-new-energy-into-cirt
March 18th, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
Sunday
10 April 2011
Elif Batuman 901
The possessed: adventures with
Russian books and the people who
read them
10am / Christ Church: Festival Room 2 / £10
This is the true story of one woman’s intellectual,
sentimental and often hilarious adventures while
exploring the Russian classics and the stories of those
who wrote them. Beginning with a description of a
conference about Isaac Babel in California at which
various destinies intersect, Elif Batuman follows the
footsteps of her favourite authors both literally and
metaphorically, searching for the answers to the big
questions.
She investigates a possible murder at Tolstoy’s
ancestral estate, travels to Samarkand and St
Petersburg; retraces Pushkin’s wanderings in the
Caucasus; learns why Old Uzbek has 100 different
words for crying; and sees an 18th-century ice palace
reconstructed on the Neva.
Elif received fantastic reviews for her book. It was a
New York Times bestseller and won the Jaffe
Foundation Writer’s Award and the prestigious Whiting
Award. She has come over from the US especially to be
with us in Oxford and appear at the Festival.
http://www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com/images/PDFs/STOLF_2011_10_April_Sun.pdf
March 20th, 2011 at 8:59 am
National Book Critics Circle: Video: NBCC 2010 Finalists Reading – Critical Mass Blog
Elif begins at about 01:33:00, right after Kay Ryan.
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/video_nbcc_2010_finalists_reading/
March 22nd, 2011 at 8:50 am
The Morning News Tournament of Books
March 22, 2011
Quarterfinals
Howard Jacobson
1The Finkler Question
v.
2A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Judged by
Elif Batuman
http://themorningnews.org/tob/
April 11th, 2011 at 11:14 am
Full Stop
Elif Batuman
in conversation with Helen Stuhr-Rommereim | 11 April 2011
http://www.full-stop.net/2011/04/11/interviews/helen-stuhr-rommereim/elif-batuman/
April 13th, 2011 at 8:01 am
April 13, 2011 – Literary Death Match
London
Tickets still available on the door!
After our most lap-slapping LDM London event ever (using a complicated “hilarity index”), we return to our more literary roots (and to Concrete) for Ep. 14, sponsored by Picador, with a lineup that’ll have you racing to Foyles to stock up on summer reading.
The reading lineup is comprised of a blissful foursome that includes Booker long-listee Edward Docx (author of Self Help, and the very-soon-to-release (April 4) The Devil’s Garden), the “almost helplessly epigrammatical” Granta reader-rep, Elif Batuman (author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them), stunning actress/author Abigail Tartellin (author of Beautiful Books’ latest release, Flick) and the deservingly-beloved author of Ten Stories About Smoking, Stuart Evers!
They’ll be judged by the night’s all-star arbiters, including Sunday Times film critic Cosmo Landesman (author of Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family & Me), belle of every literary ball Anna Goodall (former Pen Pusher editor) and actress-hilaritress extraordinaire, Samantha Baines!
Hosted by Todd Zuniga.
Where: Concrete, 56 Shoreditch High Street, London, E1 6JJ (map)
When: Doors at 7, Show at 8:15 (sharp); afterdrinks after.
Cost: £5 preorder (click “Buy Now” above); £8 on the door.
http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/upcoming-events/april-13-2011.html
April 14th, 2011 at 11:24 am
Cultural Capital
Reflections on books and the arts from the New Statesman culture desk
In the Critics this Week
Posted on 14 April 2011 18:11
An American writing special with Elif Batuman, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Derbyshire on David Foster Wallace.
[. . .]
This week’s critic-at-large, Elif Batuman, recalls her short-lived experience of creative writing courses, and wonders whether they have “damaged America’s literary imagination”.
[. . .]
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/04/derbyshire-david-writing
April 14th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
The Independent
Tom Sutcliffe: Not all boredom makes you drowsy
The week in culture
Friday, 15 April 2011
There’s often a moment in a book when your intellectual engagement with the author’s argument trips over into something more intimate, a kind of identification which is as dumb – at heart – as finding you share a taste for a certain kind of chocolate. It happened to me the other day when reading Elif Batuman’s very entertaining book The Possessed – a kind of memoir of an intellectual infatuation with Russian literature. Frankly everything had been going swimmingly anyway up to page 89. Her opening chapter, an account of helping out as an undergraduate at a Stanford conference of Isaac Babel enthusiasts, is a minor masterpiece of campus comedy – a Lucky Jim that also happens to be real. But on page 89, we really bonded when she referred to her first encounter with Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book. “I remember reading this on a bus in Turkey”, she writes, “and being deeply, viscerally bored”. I liked two things about this. One, that she had the nerve to say it at all – Orhan Pamuk being something of a sacred cow in some circles (he’s won the Nobel Prize, after all). And two that I’d been there with her. Not Turkey, I mean, but the state of tedium. There are passages of Orhan Pamuk’s prose that have challenged my eyelids in a way only matched by surgical anaesthetic.
I thought of that moment again while reading The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s “posthumous novel” [. . .]
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/tom-sutcliffe-not-all-boredom-makes-you-drowsy-2267774.html
April 19th, 2011 at 6:09 am
The Telegraph
A Page in the Life: Elif Batuman
Viv Groskop talks to an engagingly eccentric young writer, Elif Batuman, about her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which tells how she modelled her life on the great Russian novels.
By Helen Brown 2:41PM BST 14 Apr 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8450708/A-Page-in-the-Life-Elif-Batuman.html
April 21st, 2011 at 5:19 am
Elif Batuman: Life after a bestseller
Elif Batuman’s life changed when she published a hit book. She writes about how it feels no longer to be the outsider – and about asking Jonathan Franzen for some weed
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 April 2011 12.59 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/21/elif-batuman-bestseller-life
April 25th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
New Statesman
The strange craft of American writing
Elif Batuman
Published 20 April 2011
Have creative writing courses killed off America’s literary imagination?
This is an edited extract from Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People who Read Them” (Granta Books, £16.99)
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/04/creative-writing-american
May 2nd, 2011 at 7:20 am
“Türkçeyi 12 Eylül sayesinde öğrendim”
http://www.milliyet.com.tr/-turkceyi-12-eylul-sayesinde-ogrendim-/pazar/haberdetayarsiv/01.05.2011/1384556/default.htm
May 2nd, 2011 at 7:21 am
Google “translates” “Türkçeyi 12 Eylül sayesinde öğrendim”
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=tr&u=http://www.milliyet.com.tr/-turkceyi-12-eylul-sayesinde-ogrendim-/pazar/haberdetay/01.05.2011/1384556/default.htm&ei=fry-TazoI8n10gGrmYmNAw&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CCgQ7gEwAA&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%25E2%2580%259CT%25C3%25BCrk%25C3%25A7eyi%2B12%2BEyl%25C3%25BCl%2Bsayesinde%26hl%3Den%26prmd%3Divns
May 2nd, 2011 at 9:16 pm
bookforum.com / syllabi
May 2 2011
Dangerous Friends
Elif Batuman
http://www.bookforum.com/booklist/5266
May 4th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
BBC
The Strand – 28/04/2011
Harriett talks to the winners of this year’s Kraszna-Krausz Best Photography Book of the Year, novelist [sic] Elif Batuman and Clio Barnard the director behind The Arbor
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00g610b/The_Strand_28_04_2011/
May 12th, 2011 at 12:32 am
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing
Mark McGurl
http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/5389807479/the-mfa-octopus-four-questions-about-creative-writing
May 12th, 2011 at 4:13 am
Duck Beater
Mark McGurl Thinks Elif Batuman Is the Ann Coulter of Literary Journalism; or, The MFA Octopus
[Evan Bryson is a writer living in Indiana.]
http://duckbeater.tumblr.com/post/5394819243/mark-mcgurl-thinks-elif-batuman-is-the-ann-coulter-of
May 13th, 2011 at 4:42 am
A Commonplace Blog:
Thursday, May 12, 2011
The paradoxical politics of creative writing
Posted by D G [Myers] at 9:05 AM
http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2011/05/paradoxical-politics-of-creative.html
May 23rd, 2011 at 1:39 pm
The National
A return to literary classics, with a twist
David Mattin
Last Updated: May 23, 2011
Summary
Elif Bautman’s hilarious tour of 19th-century literature tells the story of contemporary writing’s own struggle for relevance. [. . .a tour to support international publication . . . brings her to London, to talk to me.]
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/a-return-to-literary-classics-with-a-twist
May 27th, 2011 at 1:34 pm
Mail & Guardian Online
Memorable season for long-suffering Pirates fans
PERCY ZVOMUYA JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – May 27 2011 08:01
[. . .]
This trait of Pirates’ fans reminds me of the fans of the Turkish club, Besiktas. Their chant, captured so eloquently by the New Yorker’s Elif Batuman, goes: “Besiktas is the most surreal team in the world. Fenerbahce and Galatasaray only care about winning, but Besiktas is essentially irrational and therefore essentially human.”
[. . .]
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-05-27-memorable-season-for-longsuffering-fans-as-pirates-plunder-silverware/
May 29th, 2011 at 2:05 am
Vladimir Nabokov: Genius or narcissist?
With publication of yet another florid paean to Lolita’s creator, Viv Groskop asks what it means to be the ultimate ‘writer’s writer’
Sunday, 29 May 2011
[. . .]
Elif Batuman (Favourite Nabokov: “Pale Fire – it really is the most incredible book”), the author of this year’s surprise non-fiction bestseller The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and People Who Read Them (Granta, £16.99), has a wonderful theory on Nabokov: “He plays to the fantasies of artsy people with the chess, the butterflies, the Russianness, but he’s the ultimate crossover artist. He gets all the role-playing fans with Zembla; he gets all the aesthetes with nostalgia and Rimbaud; and he gets the creative-writing types with the incredibly vivid pictures of Americana. I think he tried to be everything to all people, like Shakespeare.”
[. . .]
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/vladimir-nabokov-genius-or-narcissist-2290351.html
May 31st, 2011 at 2:26 pm
The Dabbler
General
Book-odourise your Kindle!
By Guest Tuesday May 31, 2011
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/05/book-odourise-your-kindle/
June 26th, 2011 at 3:39 pm
The Christian Science Monitor
Write stuff: The workshop that shapes American literature
By Robert A. Lehrman, / correspondent / June 25, 2011
Iowa City, Iowa
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, on its 75th anniversary, offers a window into the state of American letters.
(Page 2 of 7)
[. . .]
I ask her about the latest antiwriting program broadside, a scathing London Review of Books piece by critic Elif Batuman with a title that tells you what’s ahead: “Get a Real Degree.”
Dr. Batuman argues that workshops encourage craft, not excellence, tolerate students ignorant of literary tradition, and encourage “cookie cutter” stories. Of the typical workshop story, Batuman says, “I probably wouldn’t read it for fun.”
[. . .]
Canin despises the cookie-cutter argument, using a term I can’t quote. Yet Batuman isn’t wrong about everything. Of course some students need to know more. She may even have a point when she says writing-program stories are not “fun.”
[. . .]
http://tinyurl.com/3p8tcg4
June 26th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
hooray, batuman isn’t wrong about everything! for the record, i don’t remember ever using the word “cookie-cutter” in this context (or really any other context)… as far as c.w. goes, i don’t think it’s like cutting cookies, i think it’s more like weaving lanyards…
June 28th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Roz Chast | The Comics Journal
Columns
Know Your New Yorker Cartoonists
BY Richard Gehr Jun 14, 2011
http://www.tcj.com/roz-chast/
July 5th, 2011 at 1:56 am
Elif Batuman at Cúirt 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46t5JoHz_oo
July 11th, 2011 at 8:09 pm
Elif Batuman & Geoff Dyer Q&A at Cúirt 2011 (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLGe5i5WPE0
July 11th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
Elif Batuman & Geoff Dyer Q&A at Cúirt 2011 (Part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndcuRssMIcc
July 13th, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Google Translate version of “Tolstoi es el cine y Dostoyevski el teatro. Me quedo con el cine”:
“Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is the movie theater. I keep the movies”
The U.S. firm Elif Batuman a learned and entertaining work of autofiction in ‘The Possessed’
http://tinyurl.com/6bfx73v
July 29th, 2011 at 1:23 am
The New York Observer
75 Years of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: the Essay Collection
By Emily Witt
On a Tumblr far away in the Upper Midwest, lots of essays are being published about the experience of doing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Iowa.
[. . .] As far as graduate school memoirs go, thus far we might trade 75 IWW essays for one by Elif Batuman. [. . .]
[. . .]
http://www.observer.com/2011/07/75-years-of-the-iowa-writers-workshop-the-essay-collection/
August 11th, 2011 at 7:29 pm
HOME culturebox Arts, entertainment, and more.
Overrated
Authors, critics, and editors on “great books” that aren’t all that great.
By Juliet LapidosPosted Thursday, Aug. 11, 2011, at 11:46 AM ET
[. . .]
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
Like many people, I enjoy learning which canonical books are unbeloved by which contemporary writers. However, I don’t think participants in such surveys ought to blame either themselves (”I’m so lazy/uneducated”) or the canonical books (”Ulysses is so overrated”). My view is that the right book has to reach you at the right time, and no person can be reached by every book. Literature is supposed to be beautiful and/or necessary—so if at a given time you don’t either enjoy or need a certain book, then you should read something else, and not feel guilty about it.
Canonical books I did not enjoy include The Iliad and The Sound and the Fury, and, although I did read Ulysses with some degree of technical interest, it wasn’t fun for me. I maintain that this doesn’t reflect badly on Homer, Faulkner, Joyce, or me.
[. . .]
August 11th, 2011 at 7:30 pm
The URL for the text just above:
http://www.slate.com/id/2301312/
August 14th, 2011 at 2:12 am
What’s the worst great book you ever read? | The Book Haven
[by Cynthia Haven]
[. . .]
Not unsurprisingly, the most generous words come from Elif Batuman
[. . .]
FYI on Elif: Her The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, was plugged by Imitatio here. (hat tip, Dave Lull). Why the a surprise? Imitatio is the organization founded to study the ideas of René Girard, and some consider her book to be a spoof of those same ideas, with an obsessed and charismatic graduate student so unable to break the chain of mimetic desire that he finds peace and happiness only in a monastery. My own opinion: she has done a lot to revive an interest in his ideas for a new generation. The site links to the glowing Guardian review that notes the hit memoir’s “detailed engagement with René Girard’s theory of the novel and mimetic desire.”
René told me he hadn’t read it, but when I explained the plot story about the graduate student, he chuckled sagely.
[. . .]
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2011/08/whats-the-worst-great-book-you-ever-read/
August 19th, 2011 at 8:02 pm
Salon
TOPIC:
Writers and Writing
FRIDAY, AUG 19, 2011 13:21 ET
Fascinating Solzhenitsyn story makes English debut
A newly translated story by the Russian master asks elegant, timeless questions
BY ELIF BATUMAN
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2011/08/19/solzhenitsyn_story_english_debut
September 6th, 2011 at 1:51 am
The New Yorker
The Talk of the Town
In the World
by Elif Batuman September 12, 2011
Subscribers can read this article on our iPad app or in our online archive. (Others can pay for access.)
September 12, 2011 Issue
ABSTRACT: Talk story about the writer moving to Istanbul after the September 11th attacks.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/09/12/110912ta_talk_batuman
October 4th, 2011 at 7:26 pm
Douglas McGray
Writer, New York Times Magazine
The World’s First Live Magazine
Posted: 10/4/11 11:37 AM ET
Tickets to Pop-Up Magazine, the world’s first “live magazine,” go on sale today, Tuesday October 4th, at noon sharp, [. . .] popupmagazine.com. The show will feature 20 acclaimed writers, documentary filmmakers, radio producers, and photographers, live on stage at Davies Symphony Hall, followed by drinks.
[. . .]
In just four shows, we’ve been lucky to feature an amazingly talented group of contributors on stage:
[. . .] writers Michael Pollan, Mary Roach, Yiyun Li, William Finnegan, Daniel Alarcón, Peggy Orenstein, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Jeff Chang, Rebecca Solnit, Jon Mooallem, and Elif Batuman [. . .]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-mcgray/the-worlds-first-live-mag_b_994152.html
October 14th, 2011 at 11:11 pm
OCCUPY WALL STREET
The Zuccotti Literatti: Slumbering Prolixariat Awakes
By Emily Witt 3:55pm
As support for Occupy Wall Street grew in recent weeks to include all kinds of professional associations and trade unions, the writer Jeff Sharlet thought that some writers might eventually band together and circulate a statement — and maybe even sign it.
[. . .]
With his former research assistant and fellow journalist, Kiera Feldman, and Mr. Rushdie’s seal of approval (along with help from writers like Francine Prose, who sent the letter to all her writer friends) Occupy Writers, as the formerly preoccupied group came to be known, soon gathered more than 200 signatures. In addition to Mr. Rushdie, the list as it stands so far includes everyone from Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Jennifer Egan to New Yorker writer Elif Batuman to short story writer George Saunders. There are well-known activists (Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomis Klein and Wolf, and academic Judith Butler), fantasy writers (Neil Gaiman and China Miéville) and a lengthy roster of heavyweight novelists, including Ann Patchett, Allan Gurganus, Jonathan Lethem and Donna Tartt. Even children’s writer Lemony Snicket signed on, along with the editors of n+1, Tin House, The Awl, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Nation, The Onion and Guernica.
[. . .]
http://www.observer.com/2011/10/the-zuccotti-literatti-slumbering-prolixariat-awakes/
October 17th, 2011 at 9:02 am
The New Yorker
Letter from Turkey
Natural Histories
A journey in the shadow of Ararat.
by Elif Batuman October 24, 2011
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/24/111024fa_fact_batuman
October 17th, 2011 at 9:05 am
The New Yorker
AUDIO
Life in Kars
October 17, 2011
This week in the magazine, Elif Batuman travels to Kars, a city in northeastern Turkey, to visit an ornithologist. Here Blake Eskin talks with Batuman about the history of Kars, the challenges facing wildlife there, and how the human world and the natural world are interwoven.
Listen to the mp3 on the player above, or right-click here to download.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/10/24/111024on_audio_batuman
October 18th, 2011 at 10:54 pm
TUESDAY, OCT 18, 2011 2:19 PM CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
Lemony Snicket’s “observations” on Occupy Wall Street
The “Series of Unfortunate Events” author backs the Occupy movement via OccupyWriters.com
BY EMMA MUSTICH
The list of sympathetic signatories on OccupyWriters.com grows longer and more formidable by the day.
The many hundreds of writers who have so far volunteered their names in support of Occupy Wall Street and its international offshoots include Margaret Atwood, Elif Batuman, Noam Chomsky, Billy Collins, Michael Cunningham, Emma Donoghue, Jennifer Egan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eve Ensler, Sasha Frere-Jones, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Ann Patchett, Francine Prose, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem — and many, many more. Not to mention Salon’s very own Joan Walsh, Laura Miller and David Sirota!
[. . .]
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/lemony_snickets_observations_on_occupy_wall_street/singleton/
October 22nd, 2011 at 11:32 pm
Saturday, Oct 22, 2011 4:00 PM CST
Why critics of MFA programs have it wrong
Salon exclusive: The Iowa Writers’ Workshop director defends MFAs, laments young stardom and book-world cynicism
By Curtis Sittenfeld
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/22/why_critics_of_mfa_programs_have_it_wrong/singleton/
October 24th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
Barnes & Noble Review
Guest Books
Roz Chast
The cartoonist on three fiction favorites.
http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Guest-Books/Roz-Chast/ba-p/5925
December 2nd, 2011 at 2:19 pm
The Bookseller
Ricks to chair Man Booker International Prize judges
02.12.11 | Benedicte Page
The judging panel for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize will be chaired by scholar and critic Sir Christopher Ricks. Writers Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim Parks will join Ricks to judge the biennial award, worth £60,000.
[. . .]
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/ricks-chair-man-booker-international-prize-judges.html
December 5th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Save the Date—January 21 Announcement of NBCC Finalists
by admin | Dec-04-2011
The National Book Critics Circle invites you to join us on January 21 at Artists Space in New York for the announcement of the 2011 NBCC finalists in fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism, and poetry, as well as the recipients of the Nona A. Balakian Citaion for Excellence in Reviewing and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. Special guests announcing the 2011 finalists are:
[. . .]
Criticsm: Elif Batuman, 2010 NBCC finalist for The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
[. . .]
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/save-the-date-january-21-announcement-of-nbcc-finalists
December 12th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
The New Yorker
Dept. of Archeology
The Sanctuary
[Göbekli Tepe in Turkey] The world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization.
by Elif Batuman December 19, 2011
Subscribers can read this article on our iPad app or in our online archive. (Others can pay for access.)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/19/111219fa_fact_batuman
December 15th, 2011 at 6:44 am
Elif Batuman | Full Stop
14 December 2011
in conversation with Helen Stuhr-Rommereim
http://www.full-stop.net/2011/12/14/interviews/helen-stuhr-rommereim/elif-batuman/
December 22nd, 2011 at 12:14 am
Re: Urfa.
It is a delight to read a well–working mind confront the mysteries of mankind and have the courage to bring her own response to the writing thereof. For reasons you know much better, I was frequently deferred think of David’s MacCauley’s “Motel of the Mysteries”, a hilarious spoof on the imaginings of archeology. Perhaps the fine point you draw in your “wry” observations caused my aberration. In the larger sense, however, you too have shown how civilization/ mankind is still engaged in the making of myths….the deep-seated need to make “sense” of where and what we have come from.
I was truly grateful to see your inclusion of other voices, each in their own way struggling to reveal the past, esp. the implications from the sea-change shift to agriculture. And it seemed to me that you too were affected by the uncertainty of its effect on humanity. Indeed, world views are riding in the balance of the outcome, whatever it turns out to be and however it might change in the process. However might I add the obvious thought that we might never know what it was that brought us to our present circumstance from Urfa or any of ancient man sites. The evolution of culture and societies is a much more difficult unknown to unravel, largely because they are products of the mind and we simply do not have the tools to detect these subtle but profound effects on the behavior of ancient societies. We largely rely on physical evidence, inference from our own experience, and intuition/ imagination to carry us to a conclusion, however fragile. We are in an explosive period in the study of biology, botany and brain science, and more importantly how they are connected. It will be truly fascinating to see their effects, if any, on deciphering ancient societies. And we surely need the writings of you and others whose observations are telling us to be steady and careful, humble and open, balanced.
Thank you, once again,
Dean Kastel
January 7th, 2012 at 7:32 pm
Coming up January 20, NBCC and Bookforum at Center for Fiction: “Criticism Beside Itself”
by Jane Ciabattari | Jan-06-2012
Friday, January 20 7 pm.
“Criticism Beside Itself”
Center For Fiction
17 E. 47th St. • 212.755.6710
Cosponsored by Bookforum and the National Book Critics Circle
What is the proper genre of critical writing? How does criticism inform, inflect, and even colonize other forms of writing like biography, nonfiction, literary journalism, and fiction? Join us for a lively discussion of criticism today, with panelists Elif Batuman (a 2010 NBCC finalist in criticism for her collection The Possessed), novelist and critic Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances), and critic and NBCC board member Mark Athitakis, with hosts Michael Miller of Bookforum and NBCC president Eric Banks. Cosponsored by Bookforum and the National Book Critics Circle.
[. . .]
Elif Batuman (above right) is writer-in-residence at Koç University in Istanbul. Her first book, The Possessed, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a runner-up for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award (for upholding the dignity of the essay form!). It was also longlisted for the 2011 Guardian First Book Award. The Possessed did not actually win any of these awards. Nonetheless, it has been translated into several languages. Elif sometimes writes for magazines.
[. . .]
http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/coming-up-january-20-criticism-beside-itself
February 2nd, 2012 at 11:52 pm
Robert Fay: Batuman’s Take Down of MFA Literary Fiction
http://robertfay.com/2012/02/batumans-take-down-of-mfa-literary-fiction/
February 24th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
Books – Macleans.ca
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s shift from first to third
The author wants to dump the voice that made him famous
by Richard Warnica on Friday, February 24, 2012 8:50am
[. . .]
In some ways, Sullivan is not unlike his fellow GQ writer George Saunders—whose 2007 collection The Braindead Megaphone had a similar mix of stranger-in-a-strange-world reported essays. Along with other writers like Elif Batuman, they’re forming a new breed of American essayists. In the tradition of Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace, they write deeply observational and distinctively first-person work. But there’s also an interesting sense of insecure irony to each of them.
[. . .]
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/02/24/shifting-from-first-to-third/
March 30th, 2012 at 10:04 pm
TBR
Inside the List
By GREGORY COWLES
Published: March 30, 2012
HELP, THANKS, WOW: There was a time, three or four years ago, when it seemed every novelist had a blog, and why not? Blogging gave writers another way to reach readers, to promote their work or air their grievances or test their ideas in mini-essays that played to their strengths. But technology evolves, and despite some notable holdouts (Elif Batuman is one) Twitter has killed the blogging star. Now writers connect with their publics in 140 characters or fewer. The medium especially favors authors with distinct voices, preferably funny ones, who can toss off pithy observations or one-liners — authors like Anne Lamott, say [. . .]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/books/review/inside-the-list.html
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:33 pm
radio The Voice of Russia
Russian BookWorld → “The Possessed” by Elif Batuman
Konstantin Boulich
Apr 1, 2012 14:57 Moscow Time
“The Possessed” by Elif Batuman is many books in one: it is a kind of memoir, a tribute to Russian literature, a travelogue, a collection of very entertaining anecdotes, a primer in literary theory and most of all a love letter to reading and living through literature. We talk to Elif Batuman herself who is currently a writer in residence at Koç University in Istanbul as well as to Andrew Roth, a cultural commentator and a host of ‘Culture Room’ here on the Voice of Russia. Among other things we discuss if our treatment of serious literature is sometimes too serious and what happens when it is not!
http://english.ruvr.ru/radio_broadcast/28742746/70377481.html
April 25th, 2012 at 1:19 pm
The Rumpus Interview with Elif Batuman
Sean Carman · April 25th, 2012
http://therumpus.net/2012/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-elif-batuman/
May 2nd, 2012 at 2:46 pm
10 Contemporary American Essayists You Should Be Reading Right Now
by Emily Temple.
http://flavorwire.com/268863/10-contemporary-american-essayists-you-should-be-reading-right-now/2#7
May 3rd, 2012 at 6:05 am
Culture Desk
Notes on arts and entertainment from the staff of The New Yorker
May 2, 2012
The Phantom Matzo Factory
Posted by Elif Batuman
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/05/the-phantom-matzo-factory.html
May 4th, 2012 at 1:22 pm
(Photo of Israeli matzohs for sale in a Sisli grocery store, April 15, 2012; Laura Rozen)
http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/?p=135
May 4th, 2012 at 5:30 pm
Dawn of Creation
‘Magic Hours,’ Essays by Tom Bissell
By GARTH RISK HALLBERG
Published: May 4, 2012
[. . .] I see a robust demand for, and supply of, long-form “magazine writing.” And in just the last few years, a cohort of younger writers including Elif Batuman, Wells Tower, Sam Anderson and John Jeremiah Sullivan has emerged to put its distinctive stamp on the genre. I’m tempted to call the result — with apologies to Tom Wolfe, Robert Boynton and anti-taxonomists everywhere — the New New New Journalism.
[. . .]
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/magic-hours-essays-by-tom-bissell.html
May 4th, 2012 at 9:17 pm
Slate Book Review
The Critic as Memoirist
Jonathan Lethem’s new book on Talking Heads is the latest entry in an exciting new hybrid form.
By Mark O’Connell|Posted Friday, May 4, 2012, at 2:05 PM ET
[. . .]
More recently, Elif Batuman’s memoir, The Possessed, about her years as a graduate student in Russian literature at Stanford, demonstrated the grace with which writing about literature and writing about a life devoted to it can be part of a single enterprise. Batuman is a gifted critic, but her book is charged with her own anxious determination to be more than that. She seems to vacillate between not wanting to be an academic and not wanting to belong to any culture of “creative writing,” but it’s a productive kind of vacillation. “For many years,” she writes, “I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism.” This might well be because she hasn’t really made any such choice. She never says so straightforwardly, but she doesn’t have to; her writing itself is evidence of the fact that she has chosen neither (or both). She’s not a critic writing “creatively” in the classic gamekeeper-turned-poacher mode; or rather, she’s combined gamekeeping and poaching into a single activity. The book is at its most interesting when she delegates the ordinary business of literary criticism to the memoirist side of her authorial identity. In one particular scene in which Batuman discusses Anna Karenina in the kitchen with her mother, what we get is not simply an account of two people talking about a book but an incidental, ad hoc critical reading of that book:
I said that I thought Vronsky had really loved Anna.
“He couldn’t have loved her enough, or she wouldn’t have killed herself. It just wouldn’t have happened.” My mother’s theory was that the double plot of Anna Karenina represents the two kinds of men in the world: those who really like women, and those who don’t. Vronsky, a man who really liked women, overwhelmed Anna and was overwhelmed by her–but some part of him was never committed to her in the way that Levin, a man who essentially did not like women, was committed to Kitty.
[. . .]
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/05/jonathan_lethem_on_talking_heads_and_the_case_for_criticism_as_memoir_.html
May 29th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
London Review of Books
Vol. 34 No. 11 · 7 June 2012
pages 38-39 | 4470 words
Diary
Elif Batuman
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n11/elif-batuman/diary
June 7th, 2012 at 1:15 pm
War and Peace ebook readers find a surprise in its Nooks
A ’search and replace’ by Barnes & Noble switched every mention of ‘kindle’ with the name of the company’s ereader, ‘Nook’. What ebook mishaps have you come across?
Posted by Hermione Hoby
Thursday 7 June 2012 04.11 EDT guardian.co.uk
[. . .]
We could bewail the desecration of a canonical work, but Elif Batuman, whose adventures as a graduate student of Russian literature are detailed in her delightful first book, The Possessed, reckons her favourite author would have seen the funny side. She says: “Often we think of the bearded 19th-century greats as having somehow predated technology and its vicissitudes, but when you go back and look at the books, so much of it is there already. Tolstoy was really attuned to the distorting potentialities of the latest advances in telecommunication, which was, in his time, the telegraph.”
She goes on to point out that in Anna Karenina, it’s a misspelled telegram that announces her heroine’s first appearance and later, a misinterpreted telegram from Vronsky that prompts her suicide: “Anna’s life story is beaten, formed and malformed by the pressures of her time. So there’s something fitting about Tolstoy’s own novels getting malformed by technologies, albeit of a kind he couldn’t have imagined.”
Up until now I’ve thought of ebooks as having a kind of inviolability – unlike their physical equivalents, they can’t have their margins scribbled in or their pages turned over – but the “War and Nookd” case is a reminder that electronic texts are fungible and our technologies fallible. And maybe this isn’t as deleterious as the ebook refuseniks would have as believe. Maybe, in fact, the absurdities thrown up by this can actually illuminate the way we read and deepen our relationship to a book. It’s useful to be reminded that we are in fact, smarter than computers.
Batuman admits that, for her, one happy upshot of the whole affair has been the way it’s thrown into relief Tolstoy’s use of the word “kindle”: “sometimes literally (a lot of fires set in that book), sometimes metaphorically, in eyes and faces. It’s kind of great to have one’s attention drawn to the shared connotation of lighting something up from within.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jun/07/war-and-peace-ebook-nook?newsfeed=true
June 11th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Monday, June 11, 2012
writers
“The bathtub was still there, but the cat wasn’t.”
By Nicole Cliffe @ 9:45 am
Doesn’t “Elif Batuman and the Museum of Innocence” sound like a fantastic title for a magical-realism novel? Don’t miss this weird little gem in her London Review of Books diary.
Comments / Post A Comment
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http://thehairpin.com/2012/06/the-bathtub-was-still-there-but-the-cat-wasnt
June 24th, 2012 at 5:50 am
Indexing: The Fab Five, Oral History Love, Edith Wharton, Karen Russell in South Florida and More
By Vol.1 Brooklyn On June 23, 2012
A roundup of things consumed by our contributors.
Tobias Carroll
File under cognitive dissonance: sitting at a cafe in Vienna and reading a book that delves deeply into the failings of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was my experience with vacation reading book no.1, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. It was, in fact, fantastic: layered and dense and occasionally funny and more frequently terrifying, given that West was writing this in the late 1930s, just before European history imploded. It’s an odd comparison, but hey, I’ll make with the handselling: the conversational tone and ability to allude to political and literary history should appeal to fans of Elif Batuman, while the historical density and sense of moral outrage suggests that the William T. Vollman fan in your life will appreciate this. And the Penguin edition has a terrific introduction from Christopher Hitchens that I’d suggest reading after the text; Hitchens provides some interesting historical context for some of the figures encountered by West, some of which left me stunned.
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http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2012/06/23/indexing-fab-five-oral-history-love-edith-wharton-karen-russell-in-south-florida-and-more/
July 15th, 2012 at 6:01 pm
William Giraldi interviews Christopher R. Beha
Two Great Writers Talk about Writing
June 12th, 2012
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Beha: [. . .]
Speaking of positive developments, there are some very good young critics out there who I expect will have a real impact on literary culture over the next decade or two. Of my own contemporaries, I’ll read Elif Batuman or Gideon Lewis-Kraus on just about anything, but especially on books. There are a number of young novelists who are also writing great criticism. I’d put you in that camp, Billy. Also Rivka Galchen and Joshua Cohen. And Zadie Smith, who started publishing at such an age that she seems to have been around forever, is still quite young, and she’s a wonderful critic.
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http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=691&fulltext=1&media=
August 6th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Ph.D. Candidate
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/dlcl/cgi-bin/web/node/2853
September 4th, 2012 at 10:03 pm
“Banana Karenina” (a.k.a. Elif Batuman) weighs in on new Tolstoy film
http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2012/09/banana-karenina-a-k-a-elif-batuman-weighs-in-on-new-tolstoy-film/
September 14th, 2012 at 12:30 am
The Throwback
Lorin Stein has revitalized The Paris Review for the 21st Century in a way the magazine’s legendary founder George Plimpton would endorse: one night – and one cocktail – at a time
by Guy Cimbalo photography Poppy de Villeneuve
[. . .]
We’re there to meet the writer Elif Batuman, in town from Turkey. It seems we’ve kept her waiting for some time; she has been made the unwilling object of affection by some lecherous man at the bar. Batuman, if you didn’t know, is author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, as well as writing several excellent pieces for The New Yorker in recent months.
Sitting down, we discuss literary fandom, and the Guardian Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards.” The waitress confesses she’s very drunk. She takes our order two, possibly three, times. Batuman does not seem to appreciate my joke about “talking Turkey.” Batuman observes that every one of her author photographs looks as if she’s just seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. It’s beginning to feel like a Plimptonian fantasy of a literati dinner do.
[. . .]
Batuman and I discover that we were in college together. She’s a year younger than I am. Predictably I find this troubling but somehow I don’t begrudge her success. This is unusual. Admittedly, I’m drunk, but still, this night is far friendlier and far more fun than I expected.
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http://theaesthete.com/story/view.dT/the-throwback
September 17th, 2012 at 11:14 pm
Bookforum
Sept/Oct/Nov 2012
Viewer Discretion
The trajectory of writer-worrier David Foster Wallace
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
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What does it mean—for art, for well-being—to write for approval? This question was at the center of Wallace’s whole literary-anxiety complex: All of his pet worries were modes of wondering what, and whom, writing was for. When he wasn’t worrying about the traps of self-consciousness, solipsism, and radical skepticism, he was worrying about irony, slickness, or seduction. He could probably be described as the great writer-worrier of his time, and he taught a generation of essayist-reporters—those who practice what John Jeremiah Sullivan called, in a slyly patricidal piece about The Pale King for GQ, “magazine writing”—what we ought to be worrying about. Disproportionate anxiety is what differentiates magazine writing from “magazine writing,” consummate professionals such as David Grann and Katherine Boo from faux [sic] amateurs such as John Sullivan and Elif Batuman: Where the former just get on with the task at hand, the latter fret about how it’s even possible to do so.
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http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/1903/10012
November 20th, 2012 at 1:25 am
Avoidance and Penalty
By SeaWrite Media November 9, 2012
Distraction and the Art of Dodging the Page
By Elizabeth Cutright
© 2012 The Daily Creative Writer
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First – courtesy Galley Cat once again – the writers that have come before advocate embracing failure.
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Elif BatumanPart of failure involves bad writing – so embrace your grammatically (and thematically) challenged prose. As writer says, “My advice is keep writing. No time you spend writing will be wasted—even if you write something that’s bad. Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. It’s important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.”
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http://thedailycreativewriter.com/2012/11/09/avoidance-and-penalty/
November 30th, 2012 at 1:20 am
Paris Review
From the Proceedings of the First Annual Norwegian-American Literary Festival
INTERVIEWER
John mentioned false starts. Elif, do you make fewer of those, as you gain experience? Why does a writer make false starts in the first place?
ELIF BATUMAN
I wish I knew. My editor at The New Yorker was like, Why don’t you just skip the whole part where you do all the wrong things and just do the right thing?
[. . .]
To read the [all] of this piece, purchase the issue.
http://www.theparisreview.org/miscellaneous/6184/from-the-proceedings-of-the-first-annual-norwegian-american-literary-festival-the-editors
December 3rd, 2012 at 11:24 pm
“A timely, topical, readable, and thought-provoking look at the history and legacy of double-entry bookkeeping.”—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed
http://www.amazon.com/Double-Entry-Merchants-Created-Finance/dp/0393088960/
January 6th, 2013 at 9:05 pm
2013: the year ahead in books
From a full programme of film and stage adaptations to a new James Bond novel, unpublished works by RS Thomas and WG Sebald and a new prize for women writers, 2013 is set to be a real page-turner
The Guardian, Friday 4 January 2013 17.55 EST
January
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24th The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival. Philip Roth’s victory last time was preceded by a resignation from the judging panel and followed by much recrimination. Will this year’s jury chaired by Christopher Ricks and comprising Elif Batuman, Aminatta Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim Parks be more collegiate?
[. . .]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/04/2013-year-ahead-books
January 10th, 2013 at 2:11 pm
Metalist: List of book lists
By Jacob Siefring on January 9, 2013
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Literary critic Elif Batuman’s Russian favorites
In interview with Michael Silverblatt, Batuman named these Russian masterpieces the must-reads.
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Pushkin, Eugene Ogenin
Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Isaac Babel, Cavalry Cycle
Chekhov, Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard
Gogol, Dead Souls
Goncharov, Oblomov
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Platonov, The Foundation Pit or Soul
Belei, Petersburg
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http://bibliomanic.com/2013/01/09/the-list-of-lists-or-meta-list/
January 25th, 2013 at 2:10 pm
The adventures of a reader: Encounters with Elif Batuman
The Turkish-American author on Pamuk, Tolstoy and maintaining a balance between reading and living
Somak Ghoshal
First Published: Fri, Jan 25 2013. 04 33 PM IST
http://beta.livemint.com/Leisure/nAr0kPEFHS0RbQ45O9waBI/The-adventures-of-a-reader-Encounters-with-Elife-Batuman.html
January 28th, 2013 at 5:06 pm
Vladimir Sorokin shortlisted for Man Booker Prize
January 28, 2013 Alexandra Guzeva, Combined report
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According to Izvestia, Vladimir Sorokin’s chances of winning the Prize may be slightly increased by the fact that Elif Batuman, a specialist in Russian literature and the author of “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” is also on the jury.
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http://rbth.ru/arts/2013/01/28/vladimir_sorokin_shortlisted_for_man_booker_prize_22261.html
January 28th, 2013 at 9:33 pm
Bad manners and Bhabha
Monday, 28 January 2013 23:40
pioneer
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The Padma Bhushan awardee slighted writer Elif Batuman . . . .
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http://www.dailypioneer.com/vivacity/124678-bad-manners-and-bhabha.html
January 30th, 2013 at 3:01 am
Writer Batuman named on Booker International jury
ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/writer-batuman-named-on–booker-international-jury.aspx?pageID=238&nID=40068&NewsCatID=386
February 9th, 2013 at 12:43 am
The Picador Book Room · David Gutowski of Largehearted Boy stopped by…
http://picadorbookroom.tumblr.com/post/42596622973/david-gutowski-of-largehearted-boy-stopped-by-the
March 5th, 2013 at 8:29 pm
2/24/13 at 9:20 PM
Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career
Participants: Steven Amsterdam, Sam Anderson, Rosecrans Baldwin, Elif Batuman [. . .]
*This article originally appeared in the March 4, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.
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30 Comments [. . .]
Isty
Oh my god, just when I was starting to recover from the nasty feeling Seth MacFarland left on me, there’s this.
I don’t know which if [sic] these facts makes me grouchier: of 28 “notables,” 23 are not-women; of the remaining five, one is Katie Roiphe; Elif Batuman is not quoted; what the f*** Keith Gessen said; what the f*** geiko_dom said.
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http://www.vulture.com/2013/02/philip-roth-literati-poll.html
March 9th, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Reader’s writer – The Hindu
Rajni George
A conversation with Elif Batuman, whose memoir takes us into the literary dreamlands of yesteryear Russia.
http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/readers-writer/article4484509.ece