Three Rings, A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

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 ownworks 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... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachusa veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred yearsresulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering...