Either/Or

"When Elif Batuman published her debut novel, The Idiot, I couldn’t help but be embarrassed that I didn’t get the fuss, even though everybody else was prattling on about how funny it was. I was perhaps faintly bored by the adventures of Batuman’s protagonist Selin, a freshman at Harvard. But somehow the novel grew on me in leaps and bounds. In Either/Or, Selin’s back for her sophomore year, and I’m happy to report that it’s even better. Batuman’s masterful at making fun of self-serious academics and, somehow, Selin’s become so relatable, she seemed to merge with myself. I can’t wait for junior year."

"Keep an eye out for Elif Batuman’s latest novel, Either/Or , too. It picks up where her previous novel, The Idiot , left off— following Harvard linguistics student Selin through a smart, witty, literary romp through her sophomore year. As the title suggests , Selin is much taken up with questions of how to live—specifically, whether ethics should trump aesthetics—but unlike Søren Kierkegaard (I assume), she is even more concerned with parties, her college syllabus and whether or not she’s going to get laid. The film director Werner Herzog has made a first foray into fiction with his novel The Twilight World , about a Japanese soldier who defended a small island for nearly three decades after the end of World War II, unaware that the war was over. The publisher describes his style as “part documentary, part poem, and part dream”, a quality that will be immediately recognisable to fans of his films."