The New York Times Book Review…hold tight to your convictions while reading Daniel Mendelsohn lest you absorb his own. You'll want to. They're always more deeply considered, generous in spirit, fresher and funnier than yours…Mendelsohn just might be our most irresistible literary critic…
—Parul Sehgal
Publishers WeeklyWide-ranging and absorbing, this new collection of essays from Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million), is a joy from start to finish. Mendelsohn is a critic who consistently takes his subjects seriously, be they TV shows (Mad Men), 3-D blockbusters (Avatar), or the poems of Rimbaud. Though the author rarely lets us forget that he is a scholar of ancient Greek culture, connections drawn between Ovid and the Broadway musical Spider-man, or Sophocles and the story of the Titanic are frequently illuminating, even if occasionally self-aggrandizing.
