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UID:Indybay-18796879
SEQUENCE:18931922
CREATED:20170228T212400Z
DESCRIPTION:Celebrating the release of her new novel, The Idiot, published by Penguin 
 Press.\n\nA portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just 
 discovering but inventing oneself.\n\nThe year is 1995, and email is new. 
 Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at 
 Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, 
 befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, 
 almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics 
 student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each 
 email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and 
 increasingly mysterious meanings. \n\nAt the end of the school year, Ivan 
 goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian 
 countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On 
 the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer 
 in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about 
 the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any 
 other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: 
 a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first 
 love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a 
 writer.\n\nWith superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant 
 wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on 
 the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of 
 tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of 
 memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the 
 terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as 
 it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's 
 affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of 
 thinking and feeling which they entail.\n\nElif Batuman has been a staff 
 writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: 
 Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient 
 of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a 
 Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in 
 comparative literature from Stanford University.\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2017/02/28/18796879.php
SUMMARY:Elif Batuman
LOCATION:City Lights Bookstore\n261 Columbus Ave\nSan Francisco, CA 94133
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2017/02/28/18796879.php
DTSTART:20170323T020000Z
DTEND:20170323T040000Z
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