Finalist for the National Book Award Critics Circle Award and the Pen Art of the Essay Award
Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as “one of the greatest critics of our time” (Poets & Writers). In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—on a wide range of subjects, from our fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.
Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, “Private Lives,” prefaced by Mendelsohn’s New Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noël Coward, and Jonathan Franzen.
“Our most irresistible literary critic. . . .Much of the fun of reading Mendelsohn is his sense of play, his irreverence and unpredictability, his frank emotional responses. . . .He forces the [essay] form in directions Francis Bacon never imagined.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A scrumptious stylist. . . .He writes better movie criticism than most movie critics, better theatre criticism than most theatre critics and better literary criticism than just about anyone. . .practically every sentence of this book [is] an eye-opener.” —The Guardian (UK)
“Wide-ranging and absorbing, this new collection of essays from Mendelsohn is a joy from start to finish. . . . A wonderfully eclectic set of musings on the state of contemporary culture and the enduring riches of classical literature.” —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“A throwback. . . to the glorious public intellectuals of former days such as Dwight Macdonald and Robert Warshow. . . . ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ adds up to more than the sum of its parts, evidencing an impressive range, depth and nobility of mind.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“ No one who these past years has followed the brilliant work of Daniel Mendelsohn in the pages of The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review will be surprised by the extraordinary range of interest this splendid collection reveals. What is so remarkable is the consistency of acuity and sympathy which he brings to all his subjects. . . .He is, it becomes increasingly clear, one of our major critics.” —PEN Art of the Essay Award Citation
“His essays often have a deft structure, building an essential question that is left hanging. Keep reading . . . and eventually you’ll arrive at the answer. But the pleasure is not in the answer, necessarily—it’s in the process.” —National Book Critics Circle Award Citation
