Three Rings

Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honours; An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, about a transformative journey through Homer’s epic, shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford and London Hellenic prizes and winner of the Prix Méditerranée; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C.P. Cavafy, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and two collections of essays. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York and teaches at Bard college.

‘Exquisite … Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to’New York Times Book Review‘As always, the author's voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms … Three Rings, a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature’Wall Street Journal‘Spectacular … The reader feels the flow of a strong narrative, trusts the author’s seafaring skills and embarks on a brilliant journey … Three Rings is a glorious celebration of multiplicity, diversity, journeys, transformations and our common humanity’Times Literary Supplement‘Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece’Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Homeland Elegies‘An astounding Borgesian document of clarity and brilliance. A book about telling stories that wanders down the seeming two roads of the Hebrew tradition and the classical, which, like Proust's two ways, might turn out to be one way after all. Three Rings has the keeled force of a long poem’Sebastian Barry‘Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art’Joyce Carol Oates‘Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir … This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’Jonathan Lethem