Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn draws on his training as a classicist and an unusual intellectual breadth and depth of interests to bring to his criticism of popular culture. The New York Times has said, "Deeply considered, generous in spirit... Mendelsohn just might be our most irresistible literary critic." He is the author of seven books, including the international best selling nonfiction book about his search for information about family members who perished in the Holocaust, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; two collections of essays on books, film, theater and television; and an acclaimed translation of the complete works of the Alexandrian Greek poet, C.P. Cavafy. The Elusive Embrace, his memoir of family history and sexual identity twined around meditations on classical texts, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In 2002 he published a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, published by the Oxford University Press. His first collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008) was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; his second collection, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and runner-up for the PEN Art of the Essay Award.

Mendelsohn's forthcoming book is about his travels around the Mediterranean with his (now late) father, a scientist, while reading The Odyssey. His essays and reviews have appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times Book Review. Mendelsohn has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for memoir, the National Jewish Book Award, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. His most recent book, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture, was a finalist for the NBCC award in criticism and the PEN Art of the Essay prize. He teaches at Bard College. (strongstuff)… (more)

C.P. Cavafy (Complete Poems, C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems, Complete Poems, Poems)
Daniel Mendelsohn (Complete Poems, C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems, Life Stories, The Elusive Embrace, Complete Poems, Poems)

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the Poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.
Daniel Mendelsohn was born on Long Island and studied classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. His reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; and a collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. He teaches at Bard College. (added from Random House)… (more)

Daniel Mendelsohn | Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (A)
Daniel Mendelsohn’s books include the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Prix Médicis Etranger, and an acclaimed translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy, called “a tremendous gift to the literary world” by Newsday. His articles, reviews, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Review of Books, where he writes about books, theater, film, and opera. From 2000 until 2002, Mendelsohn was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. Waiting for the Barbarians is a collection of essays on subjects stretching from Mad Men to Greek myth and Spider-Man.

In conversation with Robert Silvers, Editor, New York Review of Books

215-686-5322
Cost: $15 General Admission, $7 Students (MDGentleReader)… (more)

“Artful, thoughtful and extremely funny, this is a wonderful first novel about artifice and the discovery of true feeling, about the roles we play and what we choose to make of them.”

Cathleen Schine, author of The New Yorkers

“Like the two main characters it so unforgettably etches, Richard Kramer’s first novel exemplifies the virtues of both youth and maturity: it manages to be both wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, deeply funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching. The man behind ThirtySomething and My So-Called Life has taken his trademark qualities—the grownup’s shrewdness about the way the world works and the adolescent’s disarming emotional nakedness—and fashioned from them a very affecting work of fiction.” Daniel Mendelsohn, author of Waiting for the Barbarians

Richard Kramer is the Emmy and multiple Peabody award winning writer, director and producer of numerous TV series, including Thirtysomething, My So-called Life, Tales of the City, and Once and Again. His first short story appeared in the New Yorker while he was still an undergraduate at Yale. This is his first novel.

Location: Street: Porter Square Shopping Center Additional: 25 White Street City: Cambridge, Province: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02140 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

In his latest collection of essays, the author of The Lost and The Elusive Embrace makes telling connections between diverse topics. A discussion of a recent Sappho translation leads him to consider the use of myth in Spider-Man, for example. He writes on Sontag and Noel Coward with as much energy as he does Titanic and Mad Men.

This event has been cancelled.

Street: 5015 Connecticut Ave NW City: Washington, Province: District Of Columbia Postal Code: 20008 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Daniel Mendelsohn , The Lost. A Search for Six of Six Million.

The classics scholar, literary critic and award-winning author of the acclaimed memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million discusses his search for missing relatives, the "overfamiliarity" of the Holocaust, and why we should listen to our elders.

This is a program of the Bay Area Jewish Community Centers' Cultural Collaboration (booksense)… (more)