Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

If you're in New York, cancel your plans and go to the B&N at Broadway & 82nd at 7:00 tonight to hear brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn read from his new collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken. Wherever you are, whoever you are, buy it and read it. He's phenomenally smart. Yes, really. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, once for his reviews and again for his international bestseller on searching for clues about six distant relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, The Lost, which won four other literary prizes in America and the top prize in France for foreign books as well as being named Book of the Year by Lire. Best of all are his essays, where he displays a very accessible genius on topics from Hollywood letdowns to classic Greek texts, which he taught at Princeton for six years. He's funny, too. And unlike some gay scholars who can be a tad prim, Mendelsohn doesn't avoid sex. All in all, he is the perfect avenging angel. Never did I love him more than when he smote James Schamus's absurd denial in NYROB after Focus Features degayed all the Brokeback Mountain ads as soon as it proved its crossover potential. Mendelsohn's analysis of that movie and the media's reaction is itself worth the price of the 480 page book.

Early reviews are suitably ecstatic.

Booklist: "Drawn to literature, theater, and films with a link to Greek and Roman culture, however subterranean, Mendelsohn reaches an exhilaratingly high level of discourse as he grapples with Oliver Stone’s Alexander, The Lovely Bones, Truman Capote, films about 9/11, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This impressive volume’s poetic title is from Tennessee Williams and provides the catalyst for Mendelsohn’s own profound musing over the timeless bond between the beautiful and the broken. These are works of brilliant and soulful criticism."

Publishers Weekly starred review: "...springboards for Mendelsohn’s agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In “Victims on Broadway I” he eloquently peels back layer after layer of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and criticizes not only the 2005 Broadway production as “stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility” but also the audience for what he sees as their inability to perceive pathos. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient, lost Greek epics the Cypria and the Little Iliad: unlike Homer’s Iliad, they have not “a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion” lacking in epic grandeur. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company."

Mendelsohn will be reading in Sydney August 17-19, at Washington DC's Politics and Prose on September 2, and in Paris on October 5. Next April he will publish his translations of Cavafy. Awesome.