About this item
This collection of essays exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made Daniel Mendelsohn "required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture" (The Daily Beast) . Here Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in surprising and illuminating ways.Many of these essays examine how we continue to look to the Greeks and Romans as models: some argue for the surprising modernity of canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid) , while others detect a "Greek DNA" in our responses to the Boston Marathon bombings and the assassination of JFK. Modern topics are treated, too, from the "aesthetics of victimhood" in Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life to the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and from Game of Thrones to recent films about artificial intelligence - a subject, Mendelsohn reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.
About the Author
Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, critic, and translator, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Born on Long Island, he began a career in journalism in New York City in the early 1990s while completing his Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton. Since then, his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The Paris Review, and Travel Leisure. He has been the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism, and has been a columnist for Harper's and The New York Times Book Review. He is presently a regular contributor to BBC Culture. Mendelsohn's books include a memoir, "The Elusive Embrace" (1999) , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006) , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and many other honors in the US and abroad, including the Prix Médicis in France; two collection of his essays and criticism, "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken" (2008) , a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and "Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture" (2012) , which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism and the PEN Art of the Essay Award; and a two-volume translation, with Introduction and Commentary, of the Complete Poems of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (2009) , also a Publisher Weekly Best Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Criticos Prize (U.K.) .In September 2017, his new memoir, "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic," was published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and by William Collins in the U.K., where it has been long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. Daniel Mendelsohn was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012; he is also a member of the American Philosophical Society. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches literature at Bard College and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.
