DANIEL MENDELSOHN
OF THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSReviewers & Critics
Writer
THE PRACTICAL121 POETS & WRITERS^O
NE of the most prominent and liveliest con-
temporary critics in the United States, Daniel
Mendelsoh n beg a n cont r ibut i ng rev iew s, op -
eds, and essays to a variety of publications, in-
cluding Out, the New York Times, the Nation, and the Village
Voice, while still a graduate student at Princeton University,
where he received his doctorate in classics in 1994. Over
the years he has written for an array of publications, in-
cluding the New Yorker; the New York Times Book Review
and Harper’s, in both of which he had regular columns;
and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book
critic. In February Mendelsohn was named editor-at-large
of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) and director of the
Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Among his many awards is
the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing
from the National Book Critics Circle.
Mendelsohn’s books include the memoir An Odyssey: A
Father, a Son, and an Epic (Knopf, 2017), an NPR Best Book
of the Year; the internationally best-selling Holocaust fam-
ily saga The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper,
2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
and the National Jewish Book Award; and The Elusive
Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999), a Los
Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He is also the author
of three collections of essays—Ecstasy and Terror: From the
Greeks to Game of Thrones, forthcoming in October from
New York Review Books; Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays
From the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books,
2012); and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be
Broken (Harper, 2008)—and his translation, with com-
mentary, of the complete poems of Constantine Cavafy,
published by Knopf in 2009, was a Publishers Weekly Best
Book of the Year. He is currently at work on a new transla-
tion of the Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press and
teaches literature at Bard College.Do you think literary criticism can be taught, and do
you think it should be taught in MFA programs?
I don’t think any kind of writing can be “taught.” Either
you’re a writer or you’re not, and it doesn’t matter what kind
lin of writing we’re talking about—fiction, criticism, whatever.
wo
od
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MICHAEL TAECKENS has
worked in the publishing
business since 1995. He is
a cofounder of Broadside:
Expert Literary PR
(broadsidepr.com).