In conversation with David L. Ulin, LA Times Book Editor
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books
and the People Who Read Them
Want to know Isaac Babel’s secret influence on the making of "King Kong"? Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman combines fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, along with some sad and funny stories from the people’s lives they’ve influenced—including her own.
Elif Batuman was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and went to college at Harvard. She completed a PhD in comparative literature at Stanford University in 2007. She currently lives in San Francisco, and teaches at Stanford in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Nation, and n+1. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and has a cat called Friday.
David L. Ulin is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award.
