Daniel Mendelsohn

1 week 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.

2 weeks 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.

3 weeks 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.

1 month 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.

1 month 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.