Daniel Mendelsohn

New York

Editor at Large at New York Review of Books

Author (The Lost; An Odyssey; 3 Rings; etc); translator (#Cavafy, Homer’s #Odyssey); #Classics; Ed-@-Large @nybooks; Dir@silversfound 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇮🇹🇬🇷🇳🇴🏳️‍🌈

Articles

The Man of the Moment Is 3,000 Years Old

2 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Daniel Mendelsohn

Netflix has racked up 15 No. 1 movies in 2025 so far — here’s the 3 worth watchingBeing ranked as the No. 1 movie on Netflix might not be as prestigious as winning Best Picture at the Oscars, but it’s still a sign that a film has …
The Man of the Moment Is 3,000 Years Old

2 weeks ago | nytimes.com | Daniel Mendelsohn

The figure lying on the hospital bed - silent and immobile, its head swathed in bandages and arms webbed with IV lines and oxygen tubes - barely resembled my father. And yet I was sure he was in there somewhere. It was January of 2012 and my dad, a retired research scientist and computer science professor, had just had a massive stroke, from which, we were told, he was unlikely to make a significant recovery.
Translating from Troy to Ithaca | Daniel Mendelsohn, Lauren Kane

4 weeks ago | nybooks.com | Lauren Kane |Daniel Mendelsohn

New translations of Homer are bound to revive millennia-old questions of authorship and ancient diction. As Daniel Mendelsohn writes in the introduction to his rendition of the Odyssey, published this April by the University of Chicago Press, the alluring paradox of the epic is that contemporary readers can come to it “with a bracing sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes.
Translating from Troy to Ithaca

4 weeks ago | flipboard.com | Daniel Mendelsohn |Lauren Kane

The Pope Leo XIV Guide to Chicago (Including His Favorite Pizza Joint)The new pope grew up on the Southside. And he has a favorite pizza place. Overnight, Chicago was thrust into the spotlight when one of its own was …
don't make The Odyssey 'contemporary'

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Daniel Mendelsohn

Like many other people, I was excited to read the announcement, a few months ago, that the British-American director Christopher Nolan, the auteur responsible for everything from the sci-fi extravaganza Interstellar to the recent Oscar-winning biopic Oppenheimer, has been working on a screen adaptation of the Odyssey. Nolan, after all, is famous for his spectacular visual style and densely complex narrative structures, both of which are hallmarks of the Odyssey, too.
On the Opaque Origins and Tumultuous Ancient History of Homer’s Odyssey

1 month ago | lithub.com | Daniel Mendelsohn

In some ways, the Odyssey needs no introduction: it is everywhere around us. Over the nearly thirty centuries since Homer’s thrilling epic about the hero Odysseus’s homecoming from the Trojan War began to circulate, its story, characters, and themes have become so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama, that they seem to us inevitable, natural. It’s with a start that we recall that someone had to invent them.
Why Catullus Continues to Seduce Us

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Daniel Mendelsohn

Whatever their subject or inspiration, many of these poems display the wit, pith, and cleverness that were hallmarks of the avant-garde school to which Catullus belonged, the so-called New Poets—or neoteroi, as Cicero, who preferred the old ones, sniffily referred to them.
The Critic’s Notebook

2 months ago | newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Hilton Kramer |Daniel Mendelsohn |Eric Ormsby

Art:Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond, A Catalogue Raisonné, by Jake Milgram Wien (Abbeville Press): “There was nothing small about [Paul] Landacre’s vision,” writes Dana Gioia in his afterword to the two-volume catalogue raisonné of California’s greatest wood engraver. “Despite their modest dimensions, his best prints are monumental and perdurable.” The same might be said of this finely chiseled box set produced by Abbeville Press.
A Mozartean hoot

2 months ago | newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Hilton Kramer |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn

In May 2023, I had a review that began, “It’s Mozart Month at the Metropolitan Opera.” Two new productions had premiered in the house: of Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. March 2025 is another Mozart Month at the Met. The company revived The Magic Flute last night, and will revive its Marriage of Figaro on the 31st. The Met’s Magic Flute production is the handiwork of Simon McBurney. I wrote about the production at some length when it premiered.
The Vatican’s Latinist

2 months ago | newcriterion.com | John Byron Kuhner |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Daniel Mendelsohn |John Derbyshire

In 1970, the Procurator General of the Discalced Carmelite Order, Finian Monahan, was summoned to the Vatican for a meeting. The subject of the meeting was a promising young American priest by the name of Reginald Foster. The head Latinist of the Vatican’s State Department had tapped Foster to write papal correspondence, which was at the time composed entirely in Latin. Foster wanted the job but was bound by a vow of obedience, and the decision would be made by his superiors.