"An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.”
—Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You 

“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.”
—GQ

A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. 
 
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.

With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.

"一部令人上瘾的、不断扩展的史诗；我狼吞虎咽地读完了它。"

-《第一个坏男人》和《它选择了你》的作者米兰达-朱利安。

"很容易成为我今年读过的最有趣的书"。

-GQ

一幅年轻女性艺术家的画像。一部关于不仅发现而且发明自己的小说。

这一年是1995年，电子邮件是新的。塞林，土耳其移民的女儿，来到了哈佛大学读大一。她报名参加了她从未听说过的课程，结识了她那富有魅力和世故的塞尔维亚同学斯维特拉娜，并且，几乎是偶然地，开始与来自匈牙利的数学高年级学生伊万通信。塞林可能几乎没有和伊万说过话，但随着他们每次交换电子邮件，写作行为似乎有了新的、越来越神秘的含义。

学年结束时，伊万去布达佩斯过暑假，塞林则前往匈牙利的乡村，在伊万的一个朋友开办的项目中教英语。在路上，她花了两周时间和斯维特拉娜一起访问巴黎。塞林在欧洲的夏天与她以前听说的美国大学生的典型经历没有任何共鸣，甚至与其他类型的人也没有任何共鸣。对塞林来说，这是她的一次进一步的内心旅行：面对初恋的不可言喻和令人振奋的困惑，以及她注定要成为一名作家的意识的不断增强。

巴图曼以其卓越的情感和智力敏感性、诙谐的语言和完美的风格，戏剧化地展现了成年前夕生活的不确定性。她的散文是温柔和智慧的罕见和不可模仿的结合；其逻辑就像记忆本身一样自然和难以捉摸。白痴》是对在一个既令人陶醉又令人不安的世界上成为一个人的恐怖和喜悦的英雄式而又自谦的反思。巴图曼的小说对生活中的冒犯和美丽都不加掩饰--并且能够掌握它们所带来的完整的思维和感觉。