Daniel Mendelsohn

Translating from Troy to Ithaca

“The Odyssey is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.”

Robert Gottlieb (1931–2023)

Odysseus Saved from the Sea

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

Finding a Path Through the Odyssey

I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem.

The Power of the Critic

On September 23, 2019, The New York Review of Books and David Zwirner Books hosted “The Power of the Critic,” 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.

Stopping in Vilna: Stendhal & the Holocaust Trail

In Vilna, after three years of traveling in search of my family’s story, three years of interviewing people about the worst imaginable things, I couldn’t take it any more. Two things broke me.

Ingmar Bergman, Novelist

As he entered old age and grew increasingly exasperated with filmmaking, the director turned to fiction.

Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)

“I admire great writers, people with marvelous and beautiful minds, and always hope they will do something special and revealing.”

How Greek Drama Saved the City

For the Athenians, tragedy was just as much about “the city” as it was about the individual

‘Too Hard…To Take’

A Striptease Among Pals

Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’

Bluebeard Ex Machina

Charming, Superior Robots

We have been dreaming of robots since Homer

A Good Year for Dionysus

The Bacchae: Ecstasy & Terror

John Williams’s ‘Augustus’

The ‘Stoner’ author’s novel about the first emperor of Rome

The Genius of Patrick Leigh Fermor

On ‘The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos’

The Women and the Thrones

The Cemetery Dream

For a period of two or three years during the late 1980s or early 1990s I repeatedly dreamt the same terrifying dream. Once a week sometimes, sometimes every other week, sometimes twice a week or more, it would be waiting for me as soon as I dropped off, identical each time in every detail.