ECSTASY AND TERROR:
From the Greeks to Game of Thrones
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN ART OF THE ESSAY AWARD
This collection of essays exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made Daniel Mendelsohn “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). Here Mendelsohn once again casts an eye at literature, film, television, and the personal essay, filtering his insights through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity in surprising and illuminating ways.
Many of these essays examine how we continue to look to the Greeks and Romans as models: some argue for the surprising modernity of canonical works (Bacchae, the Aeneid), while others detect a “Greek DNA” in our responses to present-day life and events: the Boston Marathon bombings, the assassination of JFK. Modern literature and popular culture are treated, too, from a consideration of the “aesthetics of victimhood” in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life to an enquiry into the novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and from Game of Thrones to recent films about artificial intelligence—a subject, Mendelsohn reminds us, that was already of interest to Homer.
The collection also brings together for the first time a number of Mendelsohn’s personal essays, including his “critic’s manifesto” and a touching memoir of his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault.
PRAISE & REVIEWS
“One of the great critics of our time.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Mendelsohn, a classicist by training, may be criticism’s answer to Michael Jordan; highbrow, lowbrow, antiquity, modernity, Sappho, ‘Suits’ — he can do all the moves, as these essays, sparkling with insight and erudition, show.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A master class in criticism, a rangy, perspicacious, occasionally spiky excursion into cultures both ancient and contemporary. His breadth of reference is characteristically formidable and put to good use. He knows that a well-chosen example, especially one that collapses traditional distinctions between high and popular culture, can be erudite, authoritative, even cool, all at once.”
—The Washington Post
“A must-read in this age where expertise is so often airily dismissed . . . To read a signature Mendelsohn essay is to be educated and entertained, and, always, freshly aware of how much more there is to read and know.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil and Sappho and gives them a vivid urgency for the present moment … He writes about things so clearly they come to feel like some of the most important things you have ever been told.”
—Sebastian Barry
“Daniel Mendelsohn is not only an incisive critic and elegant prose stylist but also a brilliant translator. . . . Even in his criticism, Mendelsohn brings a translator’s sensibility to the texts, films and plays he approaches.”
—Donna Zuckerberg, The Times Literary Supplement
“Passionately argued. He strikes the perfect balance between learned and playful … One fascinating essay after another from one of America’s best critics.”
—Kirkus