Author(s): Elif Batuman

Novel | Humour & Satire | USA | Turkey / Türkiye

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. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel-a life worthy of becoming a novel-without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself?

Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol, and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice-no matter what the cost.

Next on the list: international travel. Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either / Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers.

Hilarious, revelatory, and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.

Review: Our funniest overthinker - and the queen of the campus novel... Selin is a droll and disarming narrator, and takes her place as one of the finest hapless scholars in the literary canon. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Sunday Times *
Batuman has a gift for making the universe seem, somehow, like the benevolent and witty literary seminar you wish it were . . . This novel wins you over in a million micro-observations. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
A richly suggestive and amusing book. -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times *
A charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel... triumphal. * Daily Mail *
Such an enchanting writer. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * Sunday Times *

Author Biography: Elif 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.

Is literature a good guide to life? If not, is anything a good guide? In EITHER / OR, the quasi-protagonist, Selin, is in her second year at university, struggling to comprehend her relationships and life in general in terms of the Great Novels on her syllabus, and following some very dubious advice from friends and others. Can only an exciting and vivid life be transformed into literature, and, if so, is the necessary price of this craziness and loneliness? Batuman's novel grapples with deep issues but never stops being a large amount of fun.