Girls gone wild
Immanent readers! I address you now, free of worldly belongings, untethered to worldly concerns, divested of my bed and other housewares, separated indefinitely from my loyal intern…
I was really happy to spend part of these disembodied days making a tour of some of the East Coast’s most venerable educational institutions. A huge thanks to Carlo Rotella at Boston College, Natalie Rouland and Tom Hodge at Wellesley, and Cris Martin and Svetlana Boym at Harvard, among the many others who made this possible.
Special thanks are also due to undergraduates Madeleine Schwartz, who invited me to the Harvard Advocate, and Alexandra Dennett, who brought me to Yale’s Saint Anthony Hall. Ms. Dennett and a classmate can be seen below reading The Possessed on the shores of Lake Lagoda Ladoga:
The two friends were on a Russian summer study program together and didn’t realize they were both reading my book until they happened to sit down at the beach that afternoon!
Because I love pictures of girls gone wild for Russian literature, I was also very happy to receive the following from Amy Knowles (a calculus teacher in North Carolina), who appears below with her friend Shannon at the time of their college graduation. Amy had just written a thesis on Andrei Bolkonsky; Shannon had written about The Brothers Karamazov.
Ladies, I salute you!
Tags: academic life, clothes, events, photographs of THE POSSESSED in exotic locations, Russia, Russian literature, swamps, THE POSSESSED, today's youth
October 28th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
Elif Batuman Wins Whiting Award
http://nplusonemag.com/elif-batuman-wins-whiting-award
October 28th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
A Letter from the Editor
2010 Whiting Writers’ Awards
October 28, 2010 | by Lorin Stein
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/28/2010-whiting-writers%E2%80%99-awards/
October 28th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
‘The Whiting selection committee was delighted that Ms. Batuman had resisted the temptation to write a conventional memoir, instead taking a more slant approach in these deft, antic essays. “She doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she takes her enterprise completely seriously, even while remaining funny about it. She is sly, charming, erudite. The work takes utterly unexpected turns. Who would have believed the lives of contemporary graduate students could match the models of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in obsessiveness, wanderlust, and belief in the power of literature to transform the world?”’
http://www.whitingfoundation.org/whiting_2010_bios.html
October 29th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Holy shit! Congrats on the Whiting Award!
October 30th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Is that a prize for Creative Whiting? Congratulations! Hope you get paid in whiting too, they are among my favourite fish…
November 2nd, 2010 at 4:27 am
The Stanford Daily
Creative Solemnity
Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 | By Jenny Thai
Former Stanford graduate student Elif Batuman wins prestigious writing award
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/11/02/creative-solemnity/