Waiting for the Barbarians · Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

AND THE PEN ART OF THE ESSAY AWARD

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, Noël 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.”