Waiting for the barbarians
Subtitle: essays on the classics and pop culture
By: by Daniel Mendelsohn
Series: The New York Review collection
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 423
ISBN-13: 9781590176078
Subjects: Canon (Literature); Popular culture; Literature; Appreciation
Description: Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn's 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 & Writers"). In "Waiting for the Barbarians," he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays--each one glinting with "verve and sparkle," "acumen and passion"--A wide range of subjects, from "Avatar" to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the "Titanic" to Susan Sontag's "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 Carson's translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles--none more explosively controversial than his dissection of "Mad Men." Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell's Holocaust blockbuster "The Kindly Ones" to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, "Private Lives," prefaced by Mendelsohn's"New Yorker" essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noel Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. "Waiting for the Barbarians" once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn's "sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth."