September 15: Book Discussion with Daniel Mendelsohn and Caroline Weber
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Daniel Mendelsohn will discuss his new book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (University of Virginia Press, 2020), with Caroline Weber at 6pm ET on Tuesday, September 15.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, September 15 at 6pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn (Published by University of Virginia Press, 2020)
In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, 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 seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus―a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred 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. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.
Daniel Mendelsohn.
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.
Caroline Weber. Photo: Michael Lionstar.
Caroline Weber is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) and most recently, Proust's Duchess: How Three Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (2019). She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine. She lives in New York City.