Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.
The collection also brings together for the first time a number of Mendelsohn's personal essays, including his "critic's manifesto" and a touching memoir of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault.