Ecstasy and Terror

This collection of twenty-four essays exemplifies Daniel Mendelsohn’s wide-ranging critical interests in the Greek inheritance, film, literature, television, and the personal essay. As always his writing on these subjects is filtered through his training as a scholar of classical antiquity, in ways that are both surprising and illuminating.

Some of the essays examine how we continue to look to the Greek past to understand even the most contemporary cultural issues (while often misinterpreting it), with discussions of subjects as diverse as *The Bacchae* , the *Aeneid* , the iconography of the Pantheon, Greek philosophy and gay rights, the poetry of C.P. Cavafy, and the myth of JFK. More modern topics include novels by Helen DeWitt and Karl Ove Knausgaard, *Game of Thrones* , and films about artificial intelligence.

The collection also brings together for the first time a number of Mendelsohn’s personal essays, on subjects such as how today’s emphasis on suffering and victimhood has created a crisis in the memoir genre and his boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault.