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He also revealed who he thinks is “the greatest novelist in the English language” and several recent TV series worth watching. The three lectures, Tuesday through Thursday, were to address “A Digression: Narrative Afterlives of the Odyssey.” UVA Today asked Mendelsohn what he’s writing, reading and watching on television, as well as what he’s talking about in the Page-Barbour Lectures that brought him back to Charlottesville this week. His third collection, “Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones,” will be published in October. Mendelsohn’s essay collections include “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture” and “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken,” both heaped with praises for their wisdom and wit, intelligence and emotional insight. The book dives into the powerful relationship of father and son, both in Homer’s epic and in real life, as it recounts Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father auditing his son’s seminar on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” after which the two take a Mediterranean cruise themed to retrace the route of that mythical journey. His latest, “An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic,” published in 2017, won France’s Prix Méditerranée and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Library Journal and the Christian Science Monitor.

The author of three memoirs, Mendelsohn won the National Book Critics Circle Award and several other international prizes in 2006 for “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” which detailed his quest to discover the fates of family members in the Holocaust.

An odyssey by daniel mendelsohn