A Reading and Conversation with Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman is the author of two books: The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), a work of non-fiction that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Idiot (2016), a best-selling and critically praised novel. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010.