Elif Batuman’s new novel, Either/Or, is forthcoming with Penguin Press in May, 2022. Her first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the 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 (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism), and is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. She has been a staff writer at New Yorker since 2010, and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.