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Bacchae (Paperback)
Euripides, Robin Robertson, Daniel Mendelsohn
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R423
R310
Discovery Miles 3 100
Save R113 (27%)
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Ships in 15 - 20 working days
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Structure (Hardcover)
Isabelle Boccon-Gibod, Daniel Mendelsohn
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R1,339
Discovery Miles 13 390
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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From 1839 when it was invented, photography has served to create
portraits of individuals, and soon thereafter portraits of
families, later placed in photo albums. Photography, collected and
archived, entered the intimate sphere, enabling people to arrange
the fragmented images of their lives as they saw fit. Following its
forerunners (miniature portraits, silhouettes, physionotraces), the
photographic portrait also served the new expectations of the
emerging urban bourgeoisie and its need for social representation.
Studios opened up in cities everywhere to meet the fast growing
demand. In addition, the new medium distinguishted itself with its
esthetic superiority. "Even as it emerged, although the technique
was still very primitive, photography enjoyed an exceptional
quality of artistic finish (Gisèle Freund)". What can photography
show us to day of the visible and invisible aspects of family
sociology? "How do the roles we expect them to play betray the
emotional realities and complexities of lived life?" wonders Daniel
Mendelsohn, in his introduction entitled "Unknown Faces/ Redeeming
Structures". By creating this corpus of fixed black and white
images, each composed in a large 5'x7' frame, the photographer has
produced a work of anthropological scope, reaching beyond
representation by placing the subject at palpable distance, thereby
objectifying it. What should we think of these seemingly impassive
faces and their hypnotic gazes, what should we think of these
postures, seated or standing? What goes on within these families
and outside the frame? The use of a rigid protocol similar in all
sessions makes every family portraits intriguing, and encourages
our reflection. Inspired by the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher,
whose esthetics of objectivity tended towards minimalism, Isabelle
Boccon-Gibod, a self-made artist, with an interest for technique,
has played with a frontality quite similar to that of the Bechers,
resting on the idea that our bodies, when joined together, form a
sort of architecture. The idea, also, that a face, deprived of its
smile, offers a neutrality of expression worth considering: masks
fall and reveal a nakedness (naked truth?) to be admired and
deciphered beyond the appearances of social games. She was guided,
yet not limited, by this principle: the image of a family seen as a
façade-like structure, in which faces are the windows.
Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best
foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A
masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane,
and gorgeously precise' Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book,
best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the
mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and
the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography,
history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the
stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the
past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the
nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist
who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western
literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the
seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the
Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun
King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years -
resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald,
self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives
explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation
from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic
crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his
own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading
the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of
oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling
conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives
of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and
centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between
narrative and history, art and life.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE
LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE PRIX MEDITERRANEE 2018
From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale
of a father and son's transformative journey in reading - and
reliving - Homer's epic masterpiece. When eighty-one-year-old
retired scientist Jay unexpectedly enrols in his estranged
classicist son Daniel's course on the Odyssey, the journey of a
lifetime commences. Professor and student glean life lessons from
the page over a semester and, that summer, son and father take to
the sea to follow Odysseus's epic trail. Reading Homer becomes
their chance to understand each other before it's too late. Theirs
is a moving and erudite story of filial love and the importance of
the classics. Rich with literary and emotional insight and weaving
themes of deception and recognition, marriage and children, the
pleasures of travel and the meaning of home, this is memoir writing
at its finest.
Painted by Agnolo Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo) (Italian,
1503–1572) ca. 1550–55, the young aristocrat is Lodovico
Capponi (b. 1533), a page at the Medici court. As was his custom,
he wears black and white, his family's armorial colors. His right
index finger partially conceals the cameo he holds, revealing only
the inscription sorte (fate or fortune) — an ingenious allusion
to the obscurity of fate. In the mid 1550s Lodovico fell in love
with a girl whom Duke Cosimo had intended for one of his cousins.
After nearly three years of opposition, Cosimo suddenly relented,
but he commanded that their wedding be celebrated within
twenty-four hours.
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the
truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a
remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part
mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly
explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
Whether on Broadway or at the movies, considering a new novel or
revisiting a classic work of literature, Daniel Mendelsohn's
judgments over the past fifteen years have provoked and dazzled
with their deep erudition, disarming emotionality, and tart wit.
Now, in "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken", we
see all at once the overwhelming depth and intelligence infused in
Mendelsohn's writings, as he brings his distinctive combination of
scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras,
cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games. His striking
interpretations of our most important films - from the work of
Pedro Almodovar to "Brokeback Mountain", "United 93" and "World
Trade Center", "300", "Troy", and "The Hours" - have sparked debate
and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and
influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from "The
Producers" to Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex", from Euripides'
"Medea" to "The letters of Truman Capote". "How Beautiful It Is"
makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged
with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as
Mendelsohn is.
'Mendelsohn takes the classical costumes off figures like Virgil
and Sappho, Homer and Horace ... He writes about things so clearly
they come to feel like some of the most important things you have
ever been told.' Sebastian Barry Over the past three decades,
Daniel Mendelsohn's essays and reviews have earned him a reputation
as 'our most irresistible literary critic' (New York Times). This
striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn - a
classicist by training - uses the classics as a lens to think about
urgent contemporary debates. There is much to surprise here.
Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer's epics to help
explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted
Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the
'bad boy of Athens') about a wayward husband whose wife returns
from the dead. There are essays on Sappho's sexuality and the
feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil's Aeneid prefigures
post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed with the
Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor's final journey, Karl Ove
Knausgaard's autofiction and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee
Williams, and Noel Coward. The collection ends with a poignant
account of the author's boyhood correspondence with the historical
novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a
writer. In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles
with erudition, emotion and tart wit while his essays dance across
eras, cultures and genres. This is a provocative collection which
sees today's master of popular criticism using the ancient past to
reach into the very heart of modern culture.
The complete Cavafy poems - including the unfinished works - in a
stunning new translation. From the acclaimed author of 'The Lost',
a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering.
With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy's
form, Daniel Mendelsohn's translation brings to English the poet
who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S.
Eliot among them. Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise
of the modern world, Cavafy's poetry collapses the spectra of time,
geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as
"Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Ithica", famed for their revival
of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in
terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy's
unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From
a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel
Mendelsohn's edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh,
definitive edition of Cavafy in English.
A writer's search for his family's tragic past in World War II
becomes a remarkably original and riveting epic, brilliantly
exploring the nature of time and memory. 'The Lost' begins as the
story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance
of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject
that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades
later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters
written to his grandfather in 1939, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to
find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relative's fates. The quest
takes him to a dozen countries and forces him to confront the
wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the
stories we tell. Finally, he goes back to the small Ukrainian town
where his family's story began, and where the solution to a
decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and
present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with memories of a
vanished generation, 'The Lost' transforms the story of one family
into a profound and morally searching study of our fragile hold on
the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful and beautifully
written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost,
and found, in the passage of time.
Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best
foreign book of the year. In this genre-defying book, best-selling
memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious
links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the
artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography,
history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the
stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the
past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the
nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist
who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western
literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... Francois Fenelon, the
seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the
Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus-a veiled critique of the Sun
King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred
years-resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G.
Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering
narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and
separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and
artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write
two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir
about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted
by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its
startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which
the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders,
languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the
relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
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Augustus (Paperback)
John Williams; Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn
1
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R528
R408
Discovery Miles 4 080
Save R120 (23%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award
In "Augustus, " the third of his great novels, John Williams took
on an entirely new challenge, a historical novel set in classical
Rome, exploring the life of the founder of the Roman Empire, whose
greatness was matched by his brutality. To tell the story, Williams
also turned to a genre, the epistolary novel, that was new to him,
transforming and transcending it just as he did the western in
"Butcher's Crossing" and the campus novel in "Stoner." "Augustus"
is the final triumph of a writer who has come to be recognized
around the world as an American master.
" In "Augustus," ] John Williams re-creates the Roman Empire from
the death of Julius Caesar to the last days of Augustus, the
machinations of the court, the Senate, and the people, from the
sickly boy to the sickly man who almost dies during expedi- tions
to what would seem to be the ruthless ruler . . . . Read it in
conjunction with Robert Graves's more flamboyant "I, Claudius" and
"Claudius the God," Hermann Broch's "The Death of Virgil," and
Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian."" --Harold Augenbraum,
Executive Director of the National Book Foundation
An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn's acclaimed
two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P.
Cavafy--including the first English translation of the poet's final
Unfinished Poems--now published in one handsome edition and
featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English,
by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling
author of "The Lost."
No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture
of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut
energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic
desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and
irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933).
Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting
the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly
make the historical personal--and vice versa. To his profound
exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and
identity, Cavafy brings the historian's assessing eye along with
the poet's compassionate heart.
After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn--a
classicist who alone among Cavafy's translators shares the poet's
deep intimacy with the ancient world--gives readers full access to
the genius of Cavafy's verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances,
and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous
translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in
drafts when he died--a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that
remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades--and with an
in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each
work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this
revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive
presentation of Cavafy in English.
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Blindness (Paperback)
Henry Green; Introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn
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R379
R289
Discovery Miles 2 890
Save R90 (24%)
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Ships in 15 - 20 working days
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The Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) is a
towering figure of twentieth-century literature. No modern poet
brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean
antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the taboos
of his time surrounding homoerotic desire.
In this edition, award-winning translator and editor Daniel
Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works,
including such favorites as "Waiting for the Barbarians," "Ithaca,"
and "The God Abandons Antony." Accompanied by Mendelsohn's
explanatory notes, the poems collected here cover the vast sweep of
Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy's own
lifetime. Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or
portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's
poems make the historic profoundly and movingly personal.
In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the
truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a
remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part
mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that
brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and
history.The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a
family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the
Holocaust—an unmentionable subject that gripped his
imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the
discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his
grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a
terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining
eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes
him to a dozen countries on four continents, and forces him to
confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live
and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the
small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the
solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between
past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with
childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and
provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The
Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally
searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply
personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this
literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in
the passage of time.
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