News from the Division of Languages and Literature

“I always find it momentarily surprising that literary nonfiction is treated as something new and strange. I guess I tend to imagine fiction and nonfiction as fraternal twins, born almost at the same instant, apparently distinct but each unimaginable without the other. They perform complementary functions, and fact and invention each require the existence of the other, perhaps off to the side and perhaps not, to achieve their particular credibility.”

An excerpt from faculty member and author Norman Manea's novel The Black Envelope is now available on the Yale Books blog.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. An award-winning writer and critic and author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, he was born on Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton.

Since 1991, when he began publishing, his essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, most frequently in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He has also been the weekly book critic for New York and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and is presently a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. The Lost, published by HarperCollins in 2006, won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, and has been published in more than 15 languages. Other books include a memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a collection of his reviews, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (2008), a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and an acclaimed two-volume translation of the poetry of C. P. Cavafy (2009), also a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Mendelsohn’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Book Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism, and two Mellon Foundation awards. In 2012 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2008 Daniel Mendelsohn was named by the Economist as one of the best critics writing in the English language.

Before his father Jay's death, Bard classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn retraced with him the path of Odysseus' Mediterranean journey.

The Hannah Arendt Center and the Written Arts Program at Bard College present a one-day conference exploring the state of the individual in the landscape of Cuba and its diaspora on Wednesday, April 18, from 12 to 8 p.m. All events take place in the Bertelsmann Campus Center and are open to the public; no reservations are necessary.

Bard writer in residence Teju Cole discusses his Tweets on NPR's Morning Edition.