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Daniel Mendelsohn
Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, critic, and translator, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Born on Long Island, he began a career in journalism in New York City in the early 1990s while completing his Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton. Since... show more

Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, critic, and translator, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Born on Long Island, he began a career in journalism in New York City in the early 1990s while completing his Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton. Since then, his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The Paris Review, and Travel + Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. His books include a memoir, "The Elusive Embrace" (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and many other honors in the US and abroad, including the Prix Médicis in France; two collection of his essays and criticism, "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken" (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and "Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture" (2012); and an acclaimed two-volume translation, with Introduction and Commentary, of the Complete Poems of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (2009), also a Publisher Weekly Best Book of the Year, which was published in 2012 as a single-volume paperback. Daniel Mendelsohn was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012; he is also a member of the American Philosophical Society. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism. A longtime resident of New York City, he teaches literature at Bard College.
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Birth date: April 16, 1960
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History, Nonfiction
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Community Reviews
Chris' Fish Place
Chris' Fish Place rated it 11 years ago
In light of Goodreads recent policy shift I would like to point out what is said in the essay “Nailed” – “. . the best literary criticism has often been a form of sadistic entertainment” (161).. This book is criticism. At times, it meant be seem mean. At times, you might disagree...
spocksbro
spocksbro rated it 12 years ago
Daniel Mendelsohn’s choice of title in this collection of essays is not meant to convey a sense of impending doom as is usually associated with the phrase “waiting for the barbarians.” Rather, he wants to suggest its meaning in C.P. Cavafy’s original: The barbarians are awaited with a sense of hope;...
Allusion is not Illusion
Allusion is not Illusion rated it 13 years ago
Translation is a difficult task, and I hesitate to rate them harshly. But in this case, there are several better translations already available (contrary to what the goodreads entry says, this edition was not originally published in 1979; the entries for the differing Cavafy translations seem all mi...
spocksbro
spocksbro rated it 16 years ago
Brilliant!OK, so why put this on your "must read" list? To start, Mendelsohn is a brilliant critic who writes insightfully and without condescension to author, work or audience (reader, movie-goer, etc.). Even when he utterly demolishes his subject, he never descends to snark or gratuitous sniping. ...
Chris' Fish Place
Chris' Fish Place rated it 16 years ago
This is a compelling book. Mendelsohn keeps the focus on the search as opposed to disgressing to talk about himself as many writer in similar books do. Mendelsohn also does not talk down to the reader. At first, I was put off a little by the sections that dealt with commentary about The Torah. I...
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