1. His 1999 memoir of sexual identity and family history, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity" (Knopf, 1999; Vintage, 2000) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a French translation is scheduled for publication early in 2009.
2. His scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in EuripidesÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ Political Plays," was published in October 2002 by Oxford University Press, and appeared in February, 2005 in paperback. Recognized as a "masterful and compelling" reexamination of two Euripidean dramas long neglected by critics, it was declared a "brilliant success" in the pages of the New York Review of Books by the classicist Bernard Knox.
3. In September, 2006, Mr. Mendelsohn's international bestseller, "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," the story of his search to learn about the fates of family members who perished in the Holocaust, was published by HarperCollins to extraordinary critical acclaim in publications from O, the Oprah Magazine ("stunning...beautiful and powerfully moving")to the Washington Post Book World, where Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel called it "a vast, highly colored tapestry...a remarkable personal narrative, rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting." It received front-page reviews in a number of major national newpapers, including The New York Times Book Review, which declared "The Lost" "a powerful work of investigative empathy" that "draws us more deeply into the experience of [the Holocaust] than we might have thought possible," and "a new way of telling a story we thought we knew." A New York Times Bestseller as well as a L. A. Times and Boston Globe bestseller, the book was named among the notable or best books of 2006 by numerous publications, including The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, NPR's "Fresh Air," The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Salon.com. It was awarded the National Book Critics' Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, a Barnes and Noble "Discover" Prize, and the American Library Assocation Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Jewish Literature.
"The Lost" has had equally distinguished successes in its publications abroad. In September 2007, the French translation ("Les disparus") became an runaway bestseller, unanimously hailed by critics as "the masterpiece of the season." In November of that year it was awarded the Prix Medicis Etranger, one of the two most prestigious literary awards in France available to foreign works, and was nominated as well for the other, the Prix Femina; it was also named "Book of the Year" by LIRE magazine in December, 2007. The year 2007 also marked publications of the book in Australia and the United Kingdom (where it was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize), and in The Netherlands, Spain, Italy (where it became an immediate bestseller), and Israel, where it has enjoyed great critical acclaim and has been the #1 Bestselling nonfiction title since its release in May of that year. Further translations and publications are scheduled for Germany, Brazil, Poland, Portugal, Romania, and Greece in 2008 and 2009.
4. A collection of Daniel Mendelsohn's critical essays, "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken," will be published by HarperCollins on August 12, 2008. (See "News and Current Events" for more on this publication.)
CURRENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS
Daniel Mendelsohn has recently completed a new translation, with substantial Introduction and extensive literary commentary, of the Complete Poems of Constantine Cavafy, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in April, 2009. The second volume of this two-volume publication will feature the first English translation, with commentary, of the poet's 30 "Unfinished Poems."
