If you're going to read just one book about conference planning, Isaac Babel, Leo Tolstoy, boys' leg contests, giant apes, Uzbek poetry, the life of the mind and resignation of the soul, seek no farther: this is the book for you!

The Possessed draws on Elif Batuman's articles in the New Yorker, Harper's and n+1 to tell the true story of one woman's intellectual and sentimental education and her many strange encounters with fellow scholars devoted - absurdly! melancholically! beautifully! - to the Russian classics.

'A series of gloriously misbegotten adventures in search of Tolstoy, Doestoevsky, Babel, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev...wonderfully vivid.' Chicago Tribune