Ecstasy and Terror

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way.” His latest collection exemplifies the range, depth, and erudition that have made him “required reading for anyone interested in dissecting culture” (The Daily Beast). In Ecstasy and Terror, 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 illuminating and sometimes surprising 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.

This 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 and REVIEWS

“One of the great critics of our time.”
   —The New York Times Book Review

“Mendelsohn…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 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

“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

“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

“Mendelsohn’s points are always passionately argued. He strikes the perfect balance between learned and playful … One fascinating essay after another from one of America’s best critics.”
   —Kirkus

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….His versatility as a writer is such that, whenever he announces a new project, I feel both anticipation at the forthcoming work and a twinge of sadness that he will be writing less in other genres.”

–Donna Zuckerberg, The TLS