Waiting for the Barbarians : : Essays on the Classics and pop Culture

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Spectacles. The wizard (James Cameron's Avatar) ; Truth force at the Met (Philip Glass's Satyagraha) ; Why she fell (Julie Taymor's Spider-man) ; The dream director (Aleksandr Sokurov's The sun) ; The mad men account (Mad men) ; Unsinkable (why we can't let go of the Titanic) -- Classica. Battle lines (Stephen Mitchell's Iliad) ; In search of Sappho (Anne Carson's If not, winter) ; Arms and the man (the Landmark Herodotus) ; The strange music of Horace (J.D. McClatchy's Horace, the odes) ; Oscar Wilde, classics scholar ; Epic endeavors (three novels on the classics) -- Creative writing. After Waterloo (Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma) ; Heroine addict (the novels of Theodor Fontane) ; Rebel rebel (the poems of Arthur Rimbaud) ; The Spanish tragedy (Antonio Muñoz Molina's Sepharad) ; In gay and crumbling England (Alan Hollinghurst's The stranger's child) ; Transgression (Jonathan Littell's The kindly ones) -- Private lives. But enough about me (the memoir craze) ; His design for living (Noël Coward's Letters) ; On the town (Leo Lerman's diaries) ; Zoned out (Jonathan Franzen's The discomfort zone) ; Boys will be boys (Edmund White's City boy) ; The collector (Susan Sontag's Reborn).
Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn's reviews for "The New York Review of Books," "The New Yorker," and "The New York Times Book Review" have earned him a reputation as "one of the greatest critics of our time" ("Poets& Writers"). In "Waiting for the Barbarians," he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays--each one glinting with "verve and sparkle," "acumen and passion"--on a wide range of subjects, from "Avatar" to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the "Titanic" to Susan Sontag's "Journals." Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the "Spider-Man" musical, Anne Carson's translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles--none more explosively controversial than his dissection of "Mad Men." Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell's Holocaust blockbuster "The Kindly Ones" to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, "Private Lives," prefaced by Mendelsohn's"New Yorker" essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noel Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. "Waiting for the Barbarians" once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn's "sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth."

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e submitted by Kenes on July 12, 2020, 5:06pm appreciate popular culture