Brooklynite Elif Batuman to release profound and humorous debut novel
Brooklyn BookBeat
When published in hardcover in 2017, Elif Batuman’s debut novel “The Idiot” dazzled critics and readers alike. Even Greta Gerwig, the actress and movie director of indie sensation “Lady Bird,” named it one of her favorite books of the year, saying, “[Batuman] accomplishes in this novel what I’m always trying to do in film: make the mundane extraordinary not by adorning it but by telling it as it is.”
Now available in paperback, “The Idiot,” which will be released on March 3, takes the kind of story we think we know well — the portrait of an artist as a young woman — and turns it on its head. What results is a wickedly funny and charmingly honest novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself, too.