WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS: ESSAYS FROM THE CLASSICS TO POP CULTURE

New York City, NY: New York Review Of Books, 2012. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: New York Review Of Books, 2012. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 425 pages. Retrospective collection of literary and personal essays. One of Daniel Mendelsohn's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Daniel Mendelsohn's "Waiting For The Barbarians: Essays From The Classics To Pop Culture". His second collection, a glorious intellectual feast, the continuation of "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken" (2008), which is expanded and illuminated by his third, "Ecstasy And Terror: From The Greeks To Game of Thrones" (2015). Like those two books, it demonstrates once again his unique, profound, and indispensable understanding, not just expertise, of the distant past as well as contemporary popular culture, particularly the latter's atavistic re-imaginings of the ancient world that Mendelsohn knows so well and loves so much. "Brings together twenty-four of his recent essays, each one glinting with verve and sparkle, acumen and passion, on a wide range of subjects, from 'Avatar' to the poems of Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag's 'Journals'. Trained as a Classicist, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters to trenchant takes on pop spectacles, none more explosively controversial than his dissection of 'Mad Men'. In a final section, 'Private Lives', he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noel Coward, and Jonathan Franzen" (Publisher's blurb). An absolute "must-have" title for Daniel Mendelsohn collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed, dated (shortly after publication), and inscribed in black ink-pen on the title page by the author: "With lots of love and happy anticipation of working with you until I DIE, Daniel 11/2012". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. The recipient, who is named, is someone close to the author and cannot be named here. Mendelsohn's dedication on this copy is simply the best we have ever seen. This title is a great collection. This is the only such signed, post-publication dated, and inscribed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2007 for "The Lost". One of the most brilliant writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER DANIEL MENDELSOHN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1590176073.