Author(s): MENDELSOHN DANIEL

Culture & Ideas

In Waiting for the Barbarians, Daniel Mendelsohn--hailed by The Economist as one of the finest critics writing in the English language today--brings together twenty-four of his recent critical essays. In this collection, Mendelsohn moves from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Anne Carson's translations of Sappho, the marketing of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games) to trenchant takes on pop "spectacles" such as Avatar, Spider-Man, and Mad Men, a series whose success, Mendelsohn argued, has less to do with any formal excellence than with a profoundly sentimental appeal. Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from blockbusters such as Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones to underappreciated gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, "Private Lives," prefaced by his lengthy New Yorker essay on phony memoirs, Mendelsohn considers the lives and work of authors as disparate as Noel Coward, Susan Sontag, and Jonathan Franzen.