Join us on Wednesday, April 20 at 6pm PT when Daniel Mendelsohn celebrates his book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, with Becca Rothfeld on Zoom!
Zoom Registration AT THE LINK ABOVE
Praise for Three Rings
"Exquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey,' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again...Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to. A thrillingly inventive meditation." --The New York Times Book Review
"Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit--with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art." --Joyce Carol Oates
"Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks--or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane and gorgeously precise." --Jonathan Lethem
"Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody--Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece." --Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
About Three Rings
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.
In a genre-defying book hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times) and "spectacular" (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
About Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, a contributing editor at The Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. She contributes essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more.
show less
Zoom Registration AT THE LINK ABOVE
Praise for Three Rings
"Exquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey,' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again...Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to. A thrillingly inventive meditation." --The New York Times Book Review
"Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit--with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art." --Joyce Carol Oates
"Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks--or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane and gorgeously precise." --Jonathan Lethem
"Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody--Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece." --Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
About Three Rings
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.
In a genre-defying book hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times) and "spectacular" (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
About Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, a contributing editor at The Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. She contributes essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more.
Join us on Wednesday, April 20 at 6pm PT when Daniel Mendelsohn celebrates his book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, with Becca Rothfeld on Zoom!
Zoom Registration AT THE LINK ABOVE
Praise for Three Rings
"Exquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey,' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again...Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to. A thrillingly inventive meditation." --The New York Times Book Review
"Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit--with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art." --Joyce Carol Oates
"Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks--or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane and gorgeously precise." --Jonathan Lethem
"Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody--Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece." --Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
About Three Rings
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.
In a genre-defying book hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times) and "spectacular" (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
About Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, a contributing editor at The Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. She contributes essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more.
read more
Zoom Registration AT THE LINK ABOVE
Praise for Three Rings
"Exquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey,' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again...Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to. A thrillingly inventive meditation." --The New York Times Book Review
"Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit--with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art." --Joyce Carol Oates
"Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks--or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane and gorgeously precise." --Jonathan Lethem
"Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody--Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece." --Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies
About Three Rings
A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers--Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald--and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.
In a genre-defying book hailed as "exquisite" (The New York Times) and "spectacular" (The Times Literary Supplement), the best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul; François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for a hundred years--resulted in his banishment; and the German novelist W.G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggle to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
About Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a translation of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is the director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
About Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld is an essayist, a contributing editor at The Point, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. She contributes essays, book reviews, and the occasional art review to publications like The New York Review of Books, The TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Liberties, Bookforum, Art in America, The Baffler, and more.
show less
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