In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic—part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work—that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.
Daniel Mendelsohn, an award-winning author, critic, and translator, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Born on Long Island, he began a career in journalism in New York City in the early 1990s while completing his Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton. Since then, his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The Paris Review, and Travel + Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism.
His books include a memoir, "The Elusive Embrace" (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" (2006), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and many other honors in the US and abroad, including the Prix Médicis in France; two collection of his essays and criticism, "How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken" (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and "Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture" (2012); and an acclaimed two-volume translation, with Introduction and Commentary, of the Complete Poems of the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (2009), also a Publisher Weekly Best Book of the Year, which was published in 2012 as a single-volume paperback.
Daniel Mendelsohn was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012; he is also a member of the American Philosophical Society. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism. A longtime resident of New York City, he teaches literature at Bard College.
