Interview: Bard Professor Daniel Mendelsohn Discusses His Most Recent Book on Between the Covers, Tin House’s Literary Podcast

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn talks with David Naimon, host of Tin House’s Between the Covers podcast, about Mendelsohn’s book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, which weaves together the stories of three exiled writers Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald. Their conversation circles around narrative structures and representation, Greek and Hebrew modes of storytelling, ancient classical and biblical texts, literary digression, ring composition, family histories, the Holocaust, Homer, Cavafy, Proust, and Joyce, among other topics. “As we all know, just to make an obvious point, we’re living in a world in which the power of narratives—true, false, deliberately false, accidentally false—is something of vital importance in our lives and that is our existential struggle now. How do you know when something’s true? How do you tell it to people? Will they believe it? I think these are rather urgent points,” says Mendelsohn.

Post Date: 08-02-2022