Daniel Mendelsohn

2 months 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.

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.

Mar 25, 2025 | 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.

Mar 24, 2025 | 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.

Mar 23, 2025 | 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.