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 memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, as well as three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones.
Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit-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, made to dance together like a visible clockworks-or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise. - Jonathan Lethem 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 Three Rings is a marvel, confirming Mendelsohn's position as one of the most important and original American writers of our time. Mendelsohn does something more commonly found in the most ingenious writers of fiction; his thought-provoking examination of the reworking of stories of wandering and exile, beginning with Homer, ending with Sebald, makes this exceptional work indispensable at a time when it is no longer possible to say It couldn't happen here, now, again. - Helen DeWitt This luminous narrative, in which the tales of each of Mendelsohn's three chosen exiled writers appealingly intertwine, is about many things-memory, literature, family, immigration, and religion-and it ends where it began, with a wanderer entering an unknown city after a long voyage. This slender, exquisite book rewards on many levels. - Kirkus Reviews Mendelsohn's talent with descriptive detail brings his work alive, such as repeated descriptions of Auerbach, while exiled in Istanbul, gazing through a palace window over the turquoise Sea of Marmara. Mendelsohn never fails to entertain as he takes the reader across thousands of years' worth of literature and lives. - Publishers Weekly This essay ought to become a beloved handbook for writing Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm was in its time.... [Mendelsohn] performs [the ring method] with a piece of fabulist writing which is a thrilling new mode in a career made of dramatic shifts in register, from fire breathing reviewer to meditative memoirist on desire (The Elusive Embrace, to mournful Sebaldian archivist in the face of the Holocaust (The Lost).... The ring structure allows him to be all things at once. The way this book feels so expansive in a space so small, you don't even have to ask if the ring structure applies to things other than writing. - Literary Hub 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 'Three Rings,' a short but profoundly moving work, clings with the same tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature. Companionably and creatively, it reaches back through eras of wars and plagues and cataclysms to offer readers a reassuringly long view of the vigor of the 'Odyssey,' the book that launched a thousand books. - Wall Street Journal Memoirist and critic (and T&C contributor) Daniel Mendelsohn takes an erudite approach to the writer's dilemma in this new book, which examines the lives and work of three of history's greatest authors as well as Mendelsohn's own experience with a life of letters. - Town & Country In his supple, slender book Mendelsohn links three exiled writers... [he] ingeniously turns his straying into the end of the circle, the point from which it had strayed. More than a master class in literary analysis, Three Rings is Mendelsohn's distinctive, genre-defying inspiration. - National Book Review To read Three Rings is like spending a few hours with a brilliant, captivating conversationalist whose ardor for his subjects is contagious. It's an intellectual adventure, and a brilliant achievement. - Jewish Book Council