The Elusive Embrace
Desire and the Riddle of Identity
Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a profound exploration of the mysteries of identity. It is also a meditation in which the author uses his own divided life to investigate the "rich conflictedness of things," the double lives all of us lead.
Daniel Mendelsohn recalls the deceptively quiet suburb where he grew up, torn between his mathematician father's pursuit of scientific truth and the exquisite lies spun by his Orthodox Jewish grandfather; the streets of manhattan's newest "gay ghetto," where "desire for love" competes with "love of desire;" and the quiet moonlit…
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June 20, 2000DANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His books include the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; the definitive English translation of the Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy; and two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians. He teaches literature at Bard College.
An Odyssey
Daniel Mendelsohn
Cavafy: Poems
C. P. Cavafy; Edited and Translated with notes by Daniel Mendelsohn
Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy
C. P. Cavafy; Translated, with Introduction and Commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn
Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy
C. P. Cavafy; Translated, with Introduction and Commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn
C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems
C. P. Cavafy; Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
Life Stories
Dorothy Gallagher