Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Collections)
The most compelling reviews in Daniel Mendelsohn's very good new collection of them,Waiting for the Barbarians, are decidedly mixed. Five-thousand-word love letters require a kind of wild passion that seems foreign to Mendelsohn's coolly intelligent prose. Give him a flaw to diagnose, on the other hand, and Mendelsohn will solve it with Sherlockian elan. Mixed reviews... become intellectual detective stories, and Mendelsohn provides illuminating, elegant solutions. —David Haglund