{"title":"Elif Batuman","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"either-or-9780525557616b","title":"Either\/Or","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn instant \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestseller!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003eNotable Book of 2022\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom the acclaimed and bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e, the continuation of beloved protagonist Selin’s quest for self-knowledge, as she travels abroad and tests the limits of her newfound adulthood\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSelin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in  America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s sophomore 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? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42819751772240,"sku":"9780525557616B","price":10.49,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9780525557616-l.jpg?v=1785877194"},{"product_id":"a-cage-went-in-search-of-a-bird-ten-kafkaesque-stories-9781646222636b","title":"A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories","description":"\u003cb\u003eWhat happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFranz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a prophet and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search 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. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.","brand":"Catapult","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42819786735696,"sku":"9781646222636B","price":9.99,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9781646222636-l.jpg?v=1785877361"},{"product_id":"the-possessed-adventures-with-russian-books-and-the-people-w-9780374532185b","title":"The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them","description":"The true but unlikely stories of lives devoted to the Russian classics. No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. \"Babel in California\" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces - for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books - have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches 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 sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence - including her own. \n\n","brand":"Farrar Straus Giroux","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42820950786128,"sku":"9780374532185B","price":10.49,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9780374532185-l.jpg?v=1785881750"},{"product_id":"the-idiot-9781529948189b","title":"The Idiot","description":"\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: bold;\"\u003eDiscover TikTok's new favourite book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003eSelin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard with no idea what to expect. 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Now it’s sophomore 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, it 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 \u003ci\u003ebecoming\u003c\/i\u003e a novel—without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGuided 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. 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For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42827232313424,"sku":"9780143111061B","price":10.49,"currency_code":"CAD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9780143111061-l.jpg?v=1785909366"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookoutlet.com\/en-ca\/collections\/elif-batuman.oembed","provider":"Book Outlet","version":"1.0","type":"link"}