Do you remember what it felt like to be a college sophomore? The Jell-O shots, cookie dough and moments of abject humiliation and terror as you tried, oh so self ...

When we last met Selin, the singular protagonist of Elif Batuman’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist novel “The Idiot,” she spent the summer after her Harvard freshman year teaching in a Hungarian village, an ...

One of the greatest lessons literature can teach us is that no one should email, ever. From Philip Roth’s The Human Stain to Jonathan Safran Foer’s correspondence with Natalie Portman, readers have ...

To one kind of thinking, nothing much seems to happen in Elif Batuman’s idiosyncratic and unforgettable first novel, “The Idiot.” Her protagonist, Selin, a tall young woman of Turkish descent, arrives ...

“Either/Or” is a sequel that amplifies the meaning of its predecessor while expanding its philosophical ambit — in short, the best kind. Elif Batuman picks up the story of Selin Karadag, the wry ...

I didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would “have” it. “You’ll be so fancy,” said my mother’s sister, who had married a computer ...

The "Shirkers" filmmaker imagines her Elif Batuman adaptation as "Vertigo" meets a YA romance and Paul Thomas Anderson's latest, told through a decidedly female lens. Sandi Tan isn’t wasting any more ...

Many read to help process reality. A book’s ability to capture life experiences — though perhaps different from a reader’s own — provides a sense of comfort, a step closer to solidarity and away from ...

Do you remember what it felt like to be a college sophomore? The Jell-O shots, cookie dough and moments of abject humiliation and terror as you tried, oh so self ...

EITHER/OR. By Elif Batuman. Penguin Press. 368 pages. $27. Do you remember what it felt like to be a college sophomore? The Jell-O shots, cookie dough and moments of ...