Elif Batuman hat

Available again with the kind permission of the author

Elif Batuman (b. 1977) is an American author, academic, and journalist. She is the author of three books: a memoir, The Possessed (2010), and the novels The Idiot (2017), a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Either/Or (2022). Batuman is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Elif Batuman was born in New York City to Turkish parents, and grew up in New Jersey. She graduated from Harvard College in 1999, and received her doctorate in comparative literature from Stanford University. While attending graduate school, Batuman studied the Uzbek language in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Her dissertation, "The Windmill and the Giant: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in the Novel," is about the process of social research and solitary construction undertaken by novelists.

In February 2010, Batuman published her first book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, based on material she previously published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and N+1, which details her experiences as a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford University. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the "winsome and infectious delight she feels in the presence of literary genius and beauty."

Batuman’s novel The Idiot is a dryly funny and charmingly philosophical bildungsroman partly based on her own experiences attending Harvard in the mid-1990s and teaching English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. 2022's Either/Or is a sequel that continues the protagonist's adventures in university and abroad.

Russian literature figures heavily in Batuman's work. Both The Possessed and The Idiot pay homage to Batuman's favorite Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This hat's design is based on the cover art for the 2017 Penguin edition of The Idiot.

• 100% chino cotton twill
• Unstructured, 6-panel, low-profile
• 6 embroidered eyelets
• 3 ⅛” (7.6 cm) crown
• Adjustable strap with antique buckle