The author of The Idiot comes to DC on Tues., Feb. 20th, at 6:30PM.

From New Yorker Staff writer Elif Batuman comes The Idiot, a portrait of the artist as a young woman. With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty -- and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail. Batuman will be in conversation with the Independent's senior assignment editor, Carrie Callaghan.
At Kramerbooks, 1517 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC. Click here for info.