SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 Selin, a tall, highly strung Turkish-American from New Jersey turns up at Harvard and finds herself dangerously overwhelmed by the challenges and possibilities of adulthood. She studies linguistics and literature, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language - and languages - can and cannot do. Along the way she befriends Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb, and obsesses over Ivan, a mathematician from Hungary.

Selin ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape who we are, how difficult it is to be a failed writer, and how baffling love is. At once clever and clueless, Batuman's heroine shows us with perfect hilarity and soulful inquisitiveness just how messy it can be to forge a self.
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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.>

Chez un camarade mystérieux, dans les paroles d'une chanson des Smiths ou bien sur le tournage de King Kong : en lisant Les Possédés, vous découvrirez les grands romans russes là où vous ne les attendiez pas.
Elif Batuman nous emporte au fil de ses reportages dans une réjouissante enquête, de la Californie à l'Ouzbékistan en passant par St Petersbourg, sur l'éternelle survivance des maîtres russes (Dostoïevski, Tolstoï, Babel, Pouchkine.) dans notre vie quotidienne. En mettant en pratique la théorie d'Oscar Wilde pour qui « la vie imite l'art », Batuman entremêle sa vie personnelle aux classiques de la littérature avec une modernité rafraichissante et jubilatoire.