Either/Or

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.

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.

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.

A richly suggestive and amusing book.

Such an enchanting writer.

Either/Or is both an entertaining campus novel and an engaging disquisition on the very nature and purpose of novels.

Stupendous . . . hilarious... Batuman is a genius, rendering human folly at its most colorful and borderline surreal

The central pleasure of reading Elif Batuman's ferociously intelligent fiction... [is] the thrill of encountering things you already half-knew, rendered in language with lyrical precision... hopefully, there will be a third installment of the adventures of Elif Batuman's brilliantly modern picaro.

Wonderfully idiosyncratic... Charming

Delightful... Batuman has a formidable deadpan wit... Selin is not only an astute observer but displays a touching capacity for awe.

A charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel... triumphal.

ELIF BATUMAN 's first novel, The Idiot , was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them , which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.