Hermes strapped the beautiful sandals onto his feet,
Immortal, made of gold, which bore him across the wet seas
And endless expanses of land as swift as the breath of the wind.

 Damon the artisan (none as fine as
he in the Peloponnese) is
fashioning the Retinue of Dionysus

Daniel Mendelsohn on Homer, W. G. Sebald, and the looping, digressive narrative style known as ring composition.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, begins when his eighty-one-year-old father, Jay Mendelsohn, enrolls in Daniel’s undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey. From those risky beginnings, the two embark on an intellectua…

All of Bedford’s fiction, Daniel Mendelsohn writes, is preoccupied with the muddling consequences of history on whole families and their individual members.