Showing results for "Elif Batuman" in All Categories

It is September 1995. Selin, a Turkish-American college freshman from New Jersey, is about to embark on her first year at Harvard University, where she is determined to decipher the mysteries of language and to become a writer. In between studying psycho­linguistics and the philosophy of language, teaching ESL to a Costa Rican plumber, and befriending her classmate Svetlana (a Serbian refugee from Connecticut), Selin falls in love with a Hungarian maths student in her Russian class.

Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it's her second year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin's elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan's weird ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with Selin? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel.

There Are Rivers in the Sky is a rich, sweeping novel set between the 19th century and modern times, about love and loss, memory and erasure, hurt and healing, centred around three enchanting characters living on the banks of the River Thames and the River Tigris – their lives all curiously touched by the epic of Gilgamesh.

Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Gogol to Goncharov with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed introduces a brilliant and distinctive new voice: comic, humane, charming, poignant and completely full of an infectious love for literature.

Our brains stay active for 10 minutes after our heart stops beating. For Leila, each minute brings with it a new memory: growing up with her father and his wives in a grand old house in a quiet Turkish town; watching the women gossip and wax their legs while the men went to mosque; sneaking cigarettes and Western magazines on her way home from school; running away to Istanbul to escape an unwelcome marriage; falling in love with a student who seeks shelter from a riot in the brothel where she works.

Studentă în anul doi la Harvard, Selin încearcă să își descifreze relația neconsumată cu Ivan. Mirările și nebuniile tipice vieții studențești nu-i aduc cele mai mari satisfacții, iar dinamica dintre femei și bărbați adesea o exasperează. Dornică să-și depășească dezamăgirea amoroasă și să înțeleagă condiția umană, Selin apelează la un ghid existențial mai puțin convențional: operele unor autori precum Proust, Pușkin sau Breton. Cel mai seducător model de existență se dovedește însă a fi cel propus de Kierkegaard, care opune hedonismul comportamentului responsabil, așteptat de societate.

Nobel Prize-winner and best-selling novelist Orhan Pamuk comes to Symphony Space for a conversation with author Elif Batuman ( The Idiot) on his latest novel, The Red-Haired Woman. Sit down with one of the greatest storytellers of our time as he talks about the eternal conflicts of fathers and sons, of East and West, of tradition and modernity. With a performance from the novel by actor David Furr ( Noises Off).

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. What happens when his idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.