num_pages: 423
description: Over the past decade and a half Daniel Mendelsohns reviews for The New York Review of Books The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as one of the greatest critics of our time (Poets&amp; Writers). In Waiting for the Barbarians he brings together twenty-four of his recent essayseach one glinting with verve and sparkle acumen and passionon a wide range of subjects from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontags Journals. Trained as a classicist author of two internationally best-selling memoirs Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical Anne Carsons translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectaclesnone more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction from Jonathan Littells Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section Private Lives prefaced by MendelsohnsNew Yorker essay on fake memoirs he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman Nol Coward and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohns sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.
language: English
title: Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
publisher: New York Review Books