NYRB: Daniel Mendelsohn presents "Three Rings," with Garth Greenwell

Daniel Mendelsohn joins us to celebrate the paperback launch of his book "Three Rings," in conversation with Garth Greenwell. This virtual event, presented as part of our ongoing series with our friends at New York Review Books, took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): www.communityb...
About the book:
In a genre-defying book hailed as “exquisite” (The New York Times) and “spectacular” (The Times Literary Supplement), the 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 a 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 struggle 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.
About our guests:
Daniel Mendelsohn teaches at Bard College and is Editor-at-Large at The New York Review of Books. His books include "An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic" (2017), "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006), "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken: Essays" (2008), and, from "New York Review Books, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture" (2012) and "Ecstasy and Terror" (2019).
Garth Greenwell is the author of two books of fiction, "What Belongs to You" and "Cleanness." A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the 2021 Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in Iowa City and Louisville.