A Maybe Complete Elif Batuman Bibliography

I was strolling through the library catalog this morning, looking to see if some of the books I was hoping to read before I die were available there. One of those books was The Hangman's House (The Hungarian List) by Andrea Tompa. LFPL didn't know anything about that, so I thought I'd have a look for the more general category The Hungarian List. That search gave me 7 hits, three of which were Either / Or by Elif Batuman. 

Well, I like to Kierkegaard as much as anyone else, so I had a look at the description of that, found that Hungary was mentioned (hence the match with The Hungarian List, which list does not actually contain this work), and then found out that it was a sequel to a novel called

 

Oh, says I, so now we're going to Dostoyevsky? I've done some serious time with Fyodor--especially Crime and Punishment, which I've read at least a dozen times (since I taught it in my Senior AP English classes back in the day). But I've also read Notes From Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and, yes, The Idiot. So I thought that that would be the place to start. But I kept poking around, and venisoon after found this non-series Batuman book which caught my eye:

And of course that being another Dostoyevsky reference, I thought maybe that would be the place to start. But I poked a little further and found that 

included an essay--"Cover Story"--by Batuman, and if you're going to read a writer, you really should go chronological, right? 

But since I'd already gone that far, I thought I'd probably want to have a look for her non / pre -book works. Wikipedia?

Essays, reporting and other contributions

Jan 16, 2006 "Cool Heart" The New Yorker

February 2009 "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy" Harper's 

September 23, 2010 "Get a Real Degree" London Review of Books

December 31, 2010 "From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature" The New York Times

April 21, 2011 "Elif Batuman: Life after a bestseller" The Guardian

December 19–26, 2011 "Dept. of Archaeology: The Sanctuary" The   

     New Yorker

January 1, 2013 Two Rivers by Carolyn Drake, self-published;  

     accompanied by separate book with a short essay by Batuman

April 6, 2015 "Electrified: Adventures in Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation" The New Yorker

August 31, 2015 "The Big Dig" The New Yorker 

February 8–15, 2016 "The Head Scarf, Modern Turkey, and Me" The  

     New Yorker

December 19–26, 2016 "Epictetus" The New Yorker

April 30, 2018 "Japan's Rent-a-Family Industry" The New Yorker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman

--though I've remixed it a bit & corrected some 

proofreading error

Oops. Somebody at Wikipedia is not following through properly. There are more Elif Batuman works listed on her website, which you can see here: http://elifbatuman.com/non-books/ .

So...now that I've (quite unexpectedly) constructed a Maybe Complete Bibliography of the Works of Elif Batuman, I'm even more interested in sitting down with one of her books than I was when this whole thing started. And since the Louisville Free Public Library actually has copies of all of them, I shall now wander over there and pick myself out something nice. And I'll try to pick up the short pieces whenever I have a chance, though that will be a bit trickier.

News as it happens. 

AS IT HAPPENS: Those fuckin' search engines. Just did another search of the library website and found that there were two more travel writing books with Elif Batuman essays in them:

which includes "The Murder of Leo Tolstoy"

&

which includes "Poisoned Land."

There was also a collection of essays from the magazine n+1 

which includes "Babel in California" by Elif Batuman. As you can see, some of these essays were not listed on the Wikipedia page (but are listed on the author's website; if I have enough energy & time...two things in short supply when you have the care of two autistic adults to attend to...I think that I shall have to get to work on that Wikipedia entry).