Daniel Mendelsohn at The Village Voice Bookshop, October seventh, 2008
American critic and novelist, Daniel Mendelsohn, first read at The Village Voice Bookshop to present his memoir, The Lost: A Search For Six of Six Million. When he returned, this time it was for the launch of a collection of essays under the title How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken. The pieces included in the book had all been previously published in various literary papers and magazines, including The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and deal with themes ranging from classic literature to contemporary American film.
In his talk, Daniel Mendelsohn discussed the blooming trend of blogging and the consequential blurring of the frontier between professional criticism and a more amateurish appreciation of the arts that has developed alongside the decline of traditional newspapers and magazines, providing an insightful point of view on the question. Other subjects in the video footage include his own take on Blanche DuBois from Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and the notion of sentimentality in journalistic writing.
In this video, shot in July 2008, novelist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn remembers witnessing the attacks on the Twin Towers and reads from his essay "September 11 at the Movies" drawing an intersting comparison between the films World Trade Center by Oliver Stone and United 93 by Paul Greengrass and Aeschylus' Persians.
