
The Idiot
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Narrated by:
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Elif Batuman
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By:
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Elif Batuman
About this listen
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: A coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
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.
Named one the best books of the year by Refinery29, Mashable One, Elle Magazine, The New York Times, Bookpage, Vogue, NPR, Buzzfeed, and The Millions.
©2017 Elif Batuman (P)2017 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” (GQ)
“Masterly funny debut novel...Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” (Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair)
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The New Me
- By: Halle Butler
- Narrated by: Halle Butler
- Length: 4 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Millie, 30, just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization of just how hollow that vision has become.
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Might have been an ok read...
- By mfseegs on 04-24-19
By: Halle Butler
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Skippy Dies
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Nicola Barber, Fred Berman, Clodagh Bowyer, and others
- Length: 23 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This touching and uproarious novel by author Paul Murray made everyone’s best fiction of 2010 lists, including The Washington Post, Financial Times, Village Voice, and others. Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the mystery that links the boys of Dublin’s Seabrook College (Ruprecht Van Doren, the overweight genius obsessed with string theory; Carl, the teenager drug dealer and borderline psychotic; Philip Kilfether, the basketball-playing midget) to their parents and teachers in ways that no one could have imagined.
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Funny, touching, entertaining
- By Chicago Laura on 01-22-11
By: Paul Murray
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Exciting Times
- A Novel
- By: Naoise Dolan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An intimate, bracingly intelligent debut novel about a millennial Irish expat who becomes entangled in a love triangle with a male banker and a female lawyer. Ava, newly arrived in Hong Kong from Dublin, spends her days teaching English to rich children. Julian is a banker. A banker who likes to spend money on Ava, to have sex and discuss fluctuating currencies with her. But when she asks whether he loves her, he cannot say more than "I like you a great deal".
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It was ok...
- By zobo on 06-25-20
By: Naoise Dolan
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Thirst for Salt
- By: Madelaine Lucas
- Narrated by: Madelaine Lucas
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s hard to remember now that I was once that girl, lying in the sand in my red swimsuit and swimming late into the day. Sharkbait, he called me. It’s in the water where she first sees him: a local man almost twenty years her senior. Adrift in the summer after finishing college, a young woman is on holiday with her mother in an isolated Australian coastal town. Finding herself pulled to Jude, the man in the water, she begins losing herself in the simple, seductive rhythms of his everyday life.
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Beautifully written novel ruined by weak story
- By K. Schuster on 05-30-23
By: Madelaine Lucas
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The Woman Destroyed
- By: Simone De Beauvoir
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One of the most influential thinkers of her generation draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises in these three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” (The Sunday Herald Times). Suffused with de Beauvoir’s remarkable insights into women, The Woman Destroyed gives us a legendary writer at her best. Includes The Age of Discretion, The Monologue, and The Woman Destroyed.
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writing
- By Anjna Singh on 04-27-25
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Convenience Store Woman
- By: Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori - translator
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 3 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Tokyo resident Keiko Furukara has never fit in - neither in her family, nor in school - but when at the age of 18 she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart, she realizes instantly that she has found her purpose in life. Delighted to be able to exist in a place where the rules of social interaction are crystal clear (many are laid out line-by-line in the store's manual), Keiko does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and mode of speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.
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Am amazing and different story
- By D.R. on 04-10-19
By: Sayaka Murata, and others
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Cold Enough for Snow
- By: Jessica Au
- Narrated by: Angela Lin
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo. They walk along the canals through the autumn evenings, escape the typhoon rains, share meals in small cafes and restaurants, and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art. All the while, they talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes, and objects, about family, distance, and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here - is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey?
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Great audio!!
- By David on 12-18-22
By: Jessica Au
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My Year of Rest and Relaxation
- By: Ottessa Moshfegh
- Narrated by: Julia Whelan
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate; she works an easy job at a hip art gallery and lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
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I love it...
- By Claudia Gallegos on 07-12-18
By: Ottessa Moshfegh
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Conversations with Friends
- A Novel
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Frances is a cool-headed and darkly observant young woman vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend and comrade-in-arms is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, Frances and Bobbi catch the eye of Melissa, a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into Melissa's world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman's sophisticated home and tall, handsome husband, Nick.
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Interesting point of view; glad I listened!
- By Amazon Customer on 08-23-17
By: Sally Rooney
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Severance
- A Novel
- By: Ling Ma
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York.
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4.19 stars
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 12-06-18
By: Ling Ma
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Open City
- A Novel
- By: Teju Cole
- Narrated by: Teju Cole
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: They are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation.
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Author’s narration is special.
- By Bruce on 02-11-24
By: Teju Cole
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A Touch of Jen
- By: Beth Morgan
- Narrated by: Casey Turner
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former coworker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia's entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart. Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons.
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Speechless
- By Schabel on 07-16-21
By: Beth Morgan
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How to Fall Out of Love Madly
- A Novel
- By: Jana Casale
- Narrated by: Julia Knippen, Sophie Amoss, Imani Jade Powers, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joy and Annie are friends and roommates whose thirty-something lives aren’t exactly what they’d imagined. To make ends meet, they decide to rent their extra bedroom to Theo, who charms Joy with his salt-and-pepper hair and adoration of their one-eyed cat. When Annie goes to live with her boyfriend, Theo and Joy settle into a comfortable domesticity. Then Theo brings home Celine, the girlfriend he’s never mentioned, who is possibly the most stunning woman Joy has ever seen. Joy resolves to do whatever it takes to hold on to him, falling deeper into a hellscape of her own making.
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Characters alright/ overall tone makes you think
- By Kristina Davis on 09-21-22
By: Jana Casale
Journal entries
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A funny introspective work
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Stunning, insightful, hilarious
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Change of tone abruptly, overall good
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Not your average college novel
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Loved it ❤️❤️❤️
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Compelling and affecting 'voice'
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So good.
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Idiot
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A rare gem!
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