The Idiot: A Reading and Discussion Group
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm CET/GMT+1JJK Cafe
Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is a coming-of-age novel set during the freshman year of its central protagonist, Selin, as she navigates her own blossoming curiosity, freedom, and intellectual excitement. Batuman, through Selin, relies on language and literature to make sense of the many confounding paradoxes of college life: how the acquisition of knowledge, independence, romance, and a clearer sense of self sit alongside a bewildering reality of how any of that is to be achieved.
In a guided reading workshop led by Joshua Yaffa, BCB's writer-in-residence, participants will dive into this heady, entertaining, altogether recognizable work. (And one that has received a great deal of acclaim. It was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize, for example; the committee declared it, "A tender, funny portrait, devoid of sentimentality, of a young woman during a disorienting and pivotal year in college.") Together, the group will consider the uncertainty of love, pretensions of academia, and the confusing business of becoming an adult.
The workshop will gather for two sessions led by Yaffa; for the third, Batuman herself will come to campus for a special event, with The Idiot and its themes serving as the main focus of her conversation with students, though she will address broader questions of how to pursue a life of reading and writing. This is a unique opportunity to engage with the work of one of the premier American writers of her generation, not least through a personal encounter with the author herself. At the first session on September 16, participants will discuss a schedule for the other meetings.
Register on this Google Doc.
Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the Women’s Prize. The sequel, Either/Or, was published in 2022. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010, and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford.
Joshua Yaffa is Writer-in-Residence at Bard College Berlin. He is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, which won the Orwell Prize in 2021.
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