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Elif Batuman on Writer’s Block and the Magic of Early Email

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“Email enabled a whole new kind of pretentiousness.”

Photo: Beowulf Sheehan The narrator, heroine, and titular numbskull of Elif Batuman’s first novel The Idiot is Selin Karadag, a six-foot-tall, New Jersey–born daughter of Turkish immigrants who arrives as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1995 and spends a year connecting and failing to connect with a cast of kooks before decamping impetuously for a summer teaching English in Hungarian villages. The bit about the kooks notwithstanding, that also describes the teenage Batuman. In real life, Batuman graduated from Harvard in 1999 with a degree in Russian literature, earned a Ph.D. from Stanfo

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