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One of The Economist's 2011 Literature of the entire year The true but improbable testimonies of lives dedicated - absurdly! Melancholically! Superbly! - to the Russian classics Nobody who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever neglect it. "Babel in California" told the true history of various real human destinies intersecting at Stanford School during a conference about the enigmatic copy writer Isaac Babel. During the period of several pages, Batuman were able to misplace Babel's previous living relatives at the SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA airport terminal, uncover Babel's hidden knowledge effect on the making of King Kong, and bring in her viewers to a fresh tone of voice that was unstable, comic, humane, ironic, lovely, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously packed with love for books. Batuman's subsequent portions - for The New Yorker, Harper's Journal, and the London Review of Literature - have made her one of the most sought-after and adored freelance writers of her generation, and its own best traveling partner. In The Possessed we watch her research a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We select her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has 100 different words for crying; and find out an 18th-century glaciers palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the book, the individual ever sold, the existential plight of the graduate scholar: all find their places in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following a footsteps of her favorite creators, Batuman looks for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the miserable and funny testimonies of the lives they continue to effect - including her own. Coat Illustration © 2017 Roz Chast
