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.
The Coin (2024) Yasmin Zaher "I loved this bonkers novel. I was hooked by the voice, and mesmerized by the glamorous and sordid hijinks. I have never read such a strange and recognizable representation of post-2016 New York City, its luxury and squalor. Zaher is a writer to watch."
Godwin (2024) Joseph O'Neill "How to describe Godwin? At once a minute, hilariously observed, and poignant workplace novel about Pittsburgh, and a sweeping postcolonial picaresque novel about the grim fringes of the global soccer industry, replete with laugh-out-loud observations, gorgeously turned phrases, and exhilarating dialogue, pervaded by a winning sense of exasperated humanism. The whole time I was reading, I was thinking 'I wish there were more books like this.'"
Help Wanted (2024) Adelle Waldman "Help Wanted is like a great nineteenth-century novel about now, at once an effervescent workplace comedy and a profoundly human exploration of the psychic toll exacted by the labor market. The characters are so richly drawn-so full, under all their defenses, of the desire to be loved-that even the annoying ones will win your heart. Adelle Waldman is a master."
The Applicant (2023) Nazli Koca "The Applicant is a stunning debut, marking the arrival of an important and radical new literary voice. Nazli Koca's narrator, Leyla, a Turkish ex-student desperate to extend her stay in Berlin, ruthlessly interrogates the unspoken compromises, hypocrisies, double standards, and hierarchies that govern life in what can broadly be called the western world. An exhilarating and sometimes alarming tour of a rarely described stratum of migrants, workers, and ex-students. Electric, witty, compulsively readable, humane, and excoriating. A book I won't forget."
Cult Classic (2022) Sloane Crosley "The witty, improbably propulsive rom-com you didn't know you were waiting for - and just the sparkling, slightly sinister love letter to New York City that New York City deserves. An effervescent delight."
Post-Traumatic (2022) Chantal V Johnson "Deeply original, socially important, psychologically revelatory, propulsively and idiosyncratically readable. Post-Traumatic is a gem."
The Four Humors (2021) Mina Seçkin "Mina Seçkin's brilliant and understated first novel describes a young person's quest to situate herself geographically, culturally, historically, and physiologically--to map out a place for her inner self in the world, in her family, and in her own body. Funny, heartrending, illuminating, informative, brimming with cultural specificity and human universality."
Mrs. March (2021) Virginia Feito "Mrs. March is just the Madame Bovary-meets-Patricia Highsmith feminist psychoanalytic comedy-of-manners thriller that I didn't know I so desperately needed. I almost destroyed my life by staying up so late reading. I am lucky my house is still standing."
Lurkers (2021) Sandi Tan "A magisterial triumph from the inimitable Sandi Tan, Lurkers is brimming with sinister pathos and dead-on, laugh-out-loud observations."
Detransition, Baby (2021) Torrey Peters "Detransition, Baby updates and transcends (trans-scends!) the Sex and the City model, while fully delivering its many satisfactions! ... A noteworthy advance in the history of the novel!"
Earthlings (2020) Sayaka Murata "I loved this book! It easily converted me to being an alien. Radical, hilarious, heartbreaking."
True Story (2020) Kate Reed Petty "I literally cannot believe this book exists. A mind-blowing, page-turning, un-put-downable, heartwarming, empathetic, formally inventive horror suspense thriller, with a life-affirming and timely feminist message? What? This would be an amazing fifteenth novel for a person to have written and it is Kate Reed Petty's first one. What an incredible talent!"
Perfect Tunes (2020) Emily Gould "Perfect Tunes is mind-blowing….Full of unspeakable insights, or at least I thought they were unspeakable, but there they are. Now I want everyone I know to read this book and talk about it with me."
Eternal Life (2018) Dara Horn "Eternal Life takes the psychological novel to places I've never seen before...Riveting, startling, hilarious, and sad--I've never read anything like it."
