Daniel Mendelsohn and Michael Wood discuss Mendelshohn's new book "Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate."
Best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn acclaimed critic Michael Wood engage in conversation about Mendelsohn’s new book, in which he explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.
"Three Rings" weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works 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 17th French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, "The Adventures of Telemachus" —the best-selling book in Europe for 100 years — resulted in his banishment ... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.
Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father — that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering.
About the Speakers:
Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where he is editor-at-large. His books include the memoirs "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic" and "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" as well as three collections of essays and criticism, most recently "Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones." He teaches literature at Bard College.
Michael Wood is professor emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has written books on Vladimir Nabokov, Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as "The Road to Delphi," a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other books are "America in the Movies" and "Children of Silence." He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
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