The Possessed | Granta

  • Published: 04/07/2024
  • ISBN: 9781803510187
  • Granta Books
  • 304 pages

The Possessed

Elif Batuman

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, and unpretentiously, full of an infectious love for literature.

Wildly original, creatively rambling... the funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter

The Times

Dazzlingly good ... very bookish, very clever and very funny ... [The Possessed is] a preposterously engaging volume

Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph

The highest compliment you can pay such a book is that it sends you back to the original authors refreshed. I can go one higher - I found myself simply wanting to read more from Elif Batuman

Evening Standard

The Author

Elif Batuman was born in New York City and grew up in New Jersey. She now lives in Twin Peaks, San Francisco (near the radio tower). Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, n+1, Harper’s, LRB and the Guardian. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. This is her first book.

More about the author →

Elif Batuman on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Who Killed Tolstoy?

Elif Batuman

‘I walked along the birch-lined alleys of Yasnaya Polyana, looking for clues. Snakes were swimming in the pond, making a rippling pattern. Everything here was a museum.’

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Elif Batuman | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Elif Batuman

‘The power imbalance built into travel writing is just a heightened version of an imbalance that’s there in all writing.’