Search results for ""Author Daniel Mendelsohn""

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. ‘Astounding’ Sebastian Barry ‘A masterpiece’ Ayad Akhtar ‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

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The complete Cavafy poems – including the unfinished works – in a stunning new translation. From the acclaimed author of ‘The Lost’, a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering. With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy’s form, Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation brings to English the poet who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot among them. Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise of the modern world, Cavafy’s poetry collapses the spectra of time, geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as "Waiting for the Barbarians" and “Ithica”, famed for their revival of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy’s unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel Mendelsohn’s edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh, definitive edition of Cavafy in English.

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDITERRANÉE 2018 From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son’s transformative journey in reading – and reliving – Homer’s epic masterpiece. When eighty-one-year-old retired scientist Jay unexpectedly enrols in his estranged classicist son Daniel’s course on the Odyssey, the journey of a lifetime commences. Professor and student glean life lessons from the page over a semester and, that summer, son and father take to the sea to follow Odysseus’s epic trail. Reading Homer becomes their chance to understand each other before it’s too late. Theirs is a moving and erudite story of filial love and the importance of the classics. Rich with literary and emotional insight and weaving themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the pleasures of travel and the meaning of home, this is memoir writing at its finest.

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Painted by Agnolo Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) (Italian, 1503–1572) ca. 1550–55, the young aristocrat is Lodovico Capponi (b. 1533), a page at the Medici court. As was his custom, he wears black and white, his family's armorial colors. His right index finger partially conceals the cameo he holds, revealing only the inscription sorte (fate or fortune) — an ingenious allusion to the obscurity of fate. In the mid 1550s Lodovico fell in love with a girl whom Duke Cosimo had intended for one of his cousins. After nearly three years of opposition, Cosimo suddenly relented, but he commanded that their wedding be celebrated within twenty-four hours.

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‘Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho, Homer and Horace … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.’ Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades, Daniel Mendelsohn’s essays and reviews have earned him a reputation as ‘our most irresistible literary critic’ (New York Times). This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn – a classicist by training – uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer’s epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ‘bad boy of Athens’) about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho’s sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil’s Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author’s boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today’s master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.

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In two remarkable historical novels, Mary Renault fashions from the myth of Theseus a convincingly flawed hero and weaves a thrillingly plausible account of the Labyrinth and the infamous Minotaur. The King Must Die follows the young Theseus as he discovers that his true father is the King of Athens, and volunteers to join the annual tribute of Athenian girls and youths sacrificed to a bull-worshipping cult on the island of Crete. Trapped in the labyrinthine palace of King Minos, Theseus enlists the help of high priestess Ariadne in a daring plan to free his people. The Bull From the Sea begins after Theseus's triumphal return to Athens. He is now king, but his confidence will be shaken by a life-changing encounter with the queen of the Amazons, the birth of a son who will insist on choosing his own path, and the tragic results of his wife's treachery. Renault's deep knowledge of the Greek world, her sure grasp of psychology and genius for inspired speculation bring the distant world of the legendary past enthrallingly to life.

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From 1839 when it was invented, photography has served to create portraits of individuals, and soon thereafter portraits of families, later placed in photo albums. Photography, collected and archived, entered the intimate sphere, enabling people to arrange the fragmented images of their lives as they saw fit. Following its forerunners (miniature portraits, silhouettes, physionotraces), the photographic portrait also served the new expectations of the emerging urban bourgeoisie and its need for social representation. Studios opened up in cities everywhere to meet the fast growing demand. In addition, the new medium distinguishted itself with its esthetic superiority. "Even as it emerged, although the technique was still very primitive, photography enjoyed an exceptional quality of artistic finish (Gisèle Freund)". What can photography show us to day of the visible and invisible aspects of family sociology? "How do the roles we expect them to play betray the emotional realities and complexities of lived life?" wonders Daniel Mendelsohn, in his introduction entitled "Unknown Faces/ Redeeming Structures". By creating this corpus of fixed black and white images, each composed in a large 5'x7' frame, the photographer has produced a work of anthropological scope, reaching beyond representation by placing the subject at palpable distance, thereby objectifying it. What should we think of these seemingly impassive faces and their hypnotic gazes, what should we think of these postures, seated or standing? What goes on within these families and outside the frame? The use of a rigid protocol similar in all sessions makes every family portraits intriguing, and encourages our reflection. Inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose esthetics of objectivity tended towards minimalism, Isabelle Boccon-Gibod, a self-made artist, with an interest for technique, has played with a frontality quite similar to that of the Bechers, resting on the idea that our bodies, when joined together, form a sort of architecture. The idea, also, that a face, deprived of its smile, offers a neutrality of expression worth considering: masks fall and reveal a nakedness (naked truth?) to be admired and deciphered beyond the appearances of social games. She was guided, yet not limited, by this principle: the image of a family seen as a façade-like structure, in which faces are the windows.

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A beautifully somber photographic meditation on an ancient Jewish ritual The Jewish tradition of leaving a stone or pebble at the gravesite of a loved one is an ancient custom of remembering the departed by means of a humble natural object. Minneapolis-based photographer Vince Leo (born 1949) began taking photographs of these “visitation stones” after several people close to him died in quick succession, and he found himself enacting the ritual of grief over and over. Placing a stone is a simple but powerful gesture that connects the living to the dead. Remembered as a Blessing contains 30 of Leo’s black-and-white photographs, which honor these stones as the complex objects they are: simultaneously hard, durable pieces of matter and embodiments of ineffable spiritual relationships, often among many generations. Each of Leo’s photographs fuses light, focus, viewpoint, reflection and magnification into a moment in which the ordinary and the symbolic coexist. Daniel Mendelsohn, acclaimed author of The Lost, contributes an essay.

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