Daniel Mendelsohn

It is probably safe to say that until the early evening of June 14, readers of serious newspapers and intellectual journals such as this one were unlikely

1. In a year-end roundup of “Four Books That Deserved More Attention in 2017,” the New Yorker critic James Wood, who had placed Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go,

[caption id=“attachment_71461” align=“aligncenter” width=“1071”] Great Synagogue of Bolechów, Bolekhiv, in present day Ukraine, 2001[/caption] For a period of several years early in the new century I was working on a book the research for which required me to travel extensively throughout the United States, Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Israel, and Australia. I went to those places in order to interview a number of survivors of, and witnesses to, certain events that took place during World War I…

1. Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera

Looking back at the Spider-Man fiasco, it’s possible to see the contours of a familiar story: a woman of great talent, overweening artistic ambition, and then humiliation. In the end, Julie Taymor got her Greek drama. Like a character in some Attic play, she was led by a single-minded passion to bet…

1. Early on in Alan Hollinghurst’s big new novel—his first in seven years, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his Man Booker–winning The Line of

Lucas Zwirner, Manohla Dargis, Antwaun Sargent, Jillian Steinhauer, and Daniel Mendelsohn at David Zwirner Gallery, September 23, 2019 On September 23, 2019, The New York Review of Books and David Zwirner Books held the first in a four-part series of public talks bringing together leading writers, artists, and thinkers to explore the role of power within the cultural sphere. The series launched with “The Power of the Critic,” a conversation about the evolving role of critics, publications,…

As he entered old age and grew increasingly exasperated with filmmaking, Ingmar Bergman turned to another medium, one that would allow him to revisit one particular “framework of reality”—his parents’ lives and doomed marriage—and weave an entirely new kind of pattern from it. That medium was fictio…

Even as illness began to sap his legendary energy, Bob would lift the receiver when the office called and declaim his favorite greeting: “Hello, hello, hello!” The enthusiasm, bonhomie, and openness to possibility in that triple salutation were characteristic of Bob and defined his approach to editing “the paper.”

For us, the children of Freud, great drama is often most satisfying when it enacts the therapy-like process by which the individual psyche is stripped of its pretentions or delusions to stand, finally, exposed to scrutiny—and, as often as not, to the audience’s pity or revulsion. But although there are great Greek plays that enact the same process—Sophocles’ Oedipus inevitably comes to mind—it would appear, given the strange twinning of Athenian drama and Athenian political history, that for the Athenians, tragedy was just as much about “the city” as it was about the individual.

The title of Hanya Yanagihara’s second work of fiction stands in almost comical contrast to its length: at 720 pages, it’s one of the biggest novels to be published this year. To this literal girth there has been added, since the book appeared in March, the metaphorical weight of several prestigious award nominations. Both the size of A Little Life and the impact it has had on readers and critics alike—a best seller, the book has received adulatory reviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wa…

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata.

[caption id=“attachment_41380” align=“aligncenter” width=“940”] ‘The death of Pentheus’; detail of a red-figure cup by the Athenian painter Douris, circa 480 BC[/caption] In the spring of 411 BC, the comic playwright Aristophanes presented to the citizens of Athens a new work, Thesmophoriazousae, lampooning the tragedian Euripides. The tongue-twisting title of the play means “Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria,” a reference to an annual all-female rite held in honor of the fertility goddess Dem…

Compared to John Williams’s earlier novels, Augustus—the last work to be published by the author, poet, and professor whose once-neglected Stoner has become an international literary sensation in recent years—can seem like an oddity. The novel’s subject—the life and history-changing career of the first emperor of Rome—seems impossibly remote from the distinctly American preoccupations of Williams’s other mature works.

When Leigh Fermor—a dashing autodidact and World War II hero, considered by some to be the greatest travel writer of the twentieth century—died in 2011, at ninety-six, he had been afflicted by a writer’s block that had lasted a quarter of a century. But it turns out that the third volume of his account of youthful travels on foot across Europe was, in a way, already complete.

When Game of Thrones, the HBO television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books, began airing in April 2011, many critics and viewers dismissed the series as “boy fiction.” And yet the show has been a tremendous hit. This is, in part, a testament to the way in which fantasy entertainment—fiction, television, movies, games—has moved ever closer to the center of mass culture over the past couple of decades.

For a period of two or three years during the late 1980s or early 1990s—it’s difficult, now, to recall exactly when, but I know it was while I was a graduate student—I repeatedly dreamt the same terrifying dream. Once a week sometimes, sometimes every other week, sometimes twice a week or more, it w…

To the Editors: In his reply to Galen Strawson’s protest at his remarks about the Jewish characters in my novels [Letters, NYR, December 8, 2011], Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “I stand by my reading,” but his emphasis in fact falls differently from in his original review. There he created a vague but poisonous atmosphere of suggestion, with nothing quite spelled out, but the implication (felt by everyone I know who’s read the piece, in Britain and the United States) being of an anti-Semitic bias t…

1. When E.M. Forster sailed to Alexandria in the autumn of 1915 to take up a post as something called a “searcher”—a Red Cross functionary whose job it was to interview wounded soldiers about those still missing—he cannot have guessed at the magnitude of what he ended up finding. It certainly wasn’t what he was looking for officially; nor was it quite what he may have been seeking privately, even subconsciously. [caption id=“attachment_37826″ align=“alignright” width=“630″] E.M. Forster in Ale…

To the Editors: In his broadside against Mad Men , Daniel Mendelsohn makes some cogent points but others seem to curdle on the page.