Seven novels to read if you’re obsessed with Elif Batuman.

What is it about the campus novel? Even for those of us who didn’t attend Ivy-drenched Northeastern institutions, the genre appeals. Yet the novel that truly captures the undergraduate brain—with its suite of neuroses and affectations—is rare.

Elif Batuman’s The Idiot—and her 2022 sequel, Either/Or—certainly make the cut. And if BookTok is anything to go by, these books are still gaining fans. Maybe it’s because there’s a hapless Selin in all of us. Or maybe it’s because we yearn for the idiot days, when novels put real life to shame.

A spate of new books—and some old ones—pay homage to the academic experience with just as much fondness and wit as Batuman’s best work. Here’s a list of books to flag if you love a neurotic, novel-pilled narrator with avoidable-looking romantic problems.

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory

Following a muddled love triangle at an elite university, this curiously structured puzzle box of a book concerns a pair of married creative writing professors and one administrative consigliere. This one is Idiot-ish for the questions it circles. What is the power of narrative? And, are all attempts to understand the ‘other’ doomed to fail, in fiction?

In The Times Hannah Pittard also called this novel an “MFA expose,” which feels on point. A fun, salacious, sly look at the dark side of the English department.

Mariam Rahmani, Liquid

This 2025 debut was a charming read with an incisive class commentary attached. Like Jane A. before her, our unnamed scholar narrator has acknowledged the universal truth that marriage is, first and foremost, an economic proposition. So she sets out to marry rich.

The novel details her intricate scheme to date as many power players as possible on a timeline. But will love get in the way?

A true modern rom-com starring a self-conscious, overeducated femme with only a bunch of theory for armor? Yes, idiots. Go to, go to.

Lily King, The Pleasing Hour

King has a wetter sensibility than Batuman. Her novels tend to walk the line emotionally, making sentimental and intellectual appeals by turns. Her narrators feel deeply, even as they mostly occupy a life of the mind.

The Pleasing Hour, her debut, stars a melancholic teen au pair with—well, you guessed it—a troubling secret. Rosie is searching for meaning and desire after certain scripts have failed her. She’s a true romantic, moved and molded by great literary heroines. Chase this one with Writers & Lovers and Heart the Lover for a library girl’s gut punch.

John Williams, Stoner

This book may carry some unfair cultural freight. For a minute there, some of us on the internet were using either Stoner or Infinite Jest as red flag/shorthand for a certain brooding-writer-bro type to be avoided on the apps at all costs. But I am here to cede ground to the manosphere. This is a beautiful, sad book about the cost of falling in love with books, and therefore it is worth your idiot time.

Be warned—Dust Bowl son Professor Stoner, unlike Selin, is not exactly a “fun hang.” But he’s got the same problem: the real world just keeps falling short of fiction.

Barbara Pym, An Academic Question

The critic Becca Rothfeld pointed me to this slim gem, which follows a listless faculty wife who is faced with a light ethical dilemma. Pym is one of those writers who can make even a pretty mundane situation glitter on the page. Her narrator in this posthumously published case is Caro Grimstone, who’s having trouble investing in the stakes of small town college life.

This book’s a social comedy of manners, but its emphasis on the academy’s contradictions should appeal to Idiot lovers. Perfect commute book, too. You can read it in an hour.

Barbara Trapido, Brother of the More Famous Jack

Beginning to worry I’m a one note recommender, given how often I blather on about this novel. Alas, facts are facts. Trapido’s Künstlerrroman—which is getting a nice glow-up this fall, thanks to NYRB—is a joyful twist on the campus novel. It stars Katherine, the witty witness to an eccentric professor’s charismatic family.

This is ultimately a story of how Katherine comes into taste and self-esteem beyond the umbrella of her first troubling love. Revel in the asides and digressions. Her hot takes on The Taming of the Shrew, psychiatry, and Oxford’s “time-honoured elitism.”

Lizzy Buehler, The Obsessed

This debut novel is in open conversation with Batuman’s books, and it’s just as interested in the existential aspects of desire. Following Astrid, a student obsessed with a certain Russian American novelist, The Obsessed brings us another erudite, ever-questioning narrator with boy problems of her own design.

Idiot-fans will definitely want to throw this on the preorder pile. You can find it when school’s out, this July.