The Obsessed - by Lizzie Buehler (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An endearingly riotous coming-of-age debut from an award-winning translator, about a young woman who maps the love plot of her favorite novel onto her life and finds herself flailing when she gets into a relationship with a fellow literary obsessive.

Astrid is obsessed with the Russian American novelist Sofiya Sova, whose life trajectory serendipitously parallels Astrid's own and whose writing seems to encompass every anxiety that Astrid has ever had. In hopes of gaining the purpose she so desperately craves, she begins her PhD with the resolve to live off the ethos of Sofiya Sova's novel.

But when her boyfriend, Charlie, breaks up with her and she meets a fellow Sofiya Sova obsessive named Elijah, Astrid finds herself transcribing the love plot of her favorite novel onto her own life . . . until Elijah begins to pull away and Astrid is left flailing in a life scaffolded by obsession.

A bighearted portrait of the anxieties of desire, The Obsessed explores the trials of modern dating, the strange ennui of academia, and the question of how to create a world for yourself within and without the confines of your influences. What we're left with is a striking portrayal of how a willing reader can bring a text to life, and similarly the animating power of a good novel.

Review Quotes

"Between the sexually repressed graduate students struggling to emote and the immortalization of some truly excellent memes, The Obsessed was an enthralling, irreverent read. I will be carrying our narrator's ache that her friends 'didn't know what it meant to love a book, a writer, or a stranger as much as I did' for a long time, maybe forever. What a relief and horror to learn there are more of us out there projecting our literary obsessions onto real people than you'd think." --Ruth Madievsky, bestselling author of All-Night Pharmacy

"In this impressive debut, Lizzie Buehler chronicles obsessions--literary, romantic, as well as those that don't fall into easy categories--with so much honesty and charm the reader almost forgets to be staggered by her intellect, her wide-ranging ideas and expertise on languages and literary cultures. The Obsessed is enjoyable, relatable, and filled with things to obsess over long after the novel is over." --Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

About the Author

Lizzie Buehler is the translator of The Disaster Tourist (winner of the CWA Dagger for crime fiction in translation), Art on Fire, and Table for One by Yun Ko-eun, and Korean Teachers by Seo Su-jin. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and has studied comparative literature at Harvard and Princeton. The Obsessed is her debut novel.