Classicist, historian, memoirist, cultural critic, wit--with consummate skill and the sharp, sympathetic eye of the poet, Daniel Mendelsohn brilliantly combines these roles. Three Rings is a masterly exegesis and demonstration of digression as a high art.

Three Rings is a marvel, confirming Mendelsohn's position as one of the most important and original American writers of our time. Mendelsohn does something more commonly found in the most ingenious writers of fiction; his thought-provoking examination of the reworking of stories of wandering and exile, beginning with Homer, ending with Sebald, makes this exceptional work indispensable at a time when it is no longer possible to say "It couldn't happen here, now, again."

This luminous narrative, in which the tales of each of Mendelsohn's three chosen exiled writers appealingly intertwine, is about many things--memory, literature, family, immigration, and religion--and it ends where it began, with a "wanderer" entering "an unknown city after a long voyage."

This slender, exquisite book rewards on many levels.

This essay ought to become a beloved handbook for writing Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm was in its time.... [Mendelsohn] performs [the ring method] with a piece of fabulist writing which is a thrilling new mode in a career made of dramatic shifts in register, from fire breathing reviewer to meditative memoirist on desire (The Elusive Embrace, to mournful Sebaldian archivist in the face of the Holocaust (The Lost).... The ring structure allows him to be all things at once. The way this book feels so expansive in a space so small, you don't even have to ask if the ring structure applies to things other than writing.

As always, the author's voice blends authority with considerable warmth and charm, luring readers into his complex intellectual enthusiasms. Mr. Mendelsohn has honed a prose style that is nuanced yet clear, without a hint of pedantry, and one is always glad to learn what he has to teach.... Three Rings, a short but profoundly moving work, clings with tenacity to a belief in the regenerative power of literature.

In his supple, slender book Mendelsohn links three exiled writers... [he] ingeniously turns his straying into the end of the circle, the point from which it had strayed. More than a master class in literary analysis, Three Rings is Mendelsohn's distinctive, genre-defying inspiration."

This slim vol-ume swirls with Daniel Mendelsohn's sub-lime reflec-tions on his-to-ry, archi-tec-ture, religion, the-ater, lit-er-a-ture, schol-ar-ship, and on his own life. To read it is like spend-ing a few hours with a bril-liant, cap-ti-vat-ing con-ver-sa-tion-al-ist whose ardor for his sub-jects is con-ta-gious. It's an intellec-tu-al adven-ture, and a bril-liant achievement.

In book after book, he confirms his status on the cultural scene as the successor of the late lamented George Steiner.

Mendelsohn is a natural story-teller and he has managed to turn a multi-century saga of literary criticism and history into an immensely entertaining, readable, and short(!) book..if only more literary criticism (and scholarship, in general) were delivered this way, it would have a much greater audience and impact... Three Rings is a book you must read for yourself, to witness Mendelsohn as he unravels and lays bare the connections between Homer, Auerbach, Fénélon, Sebald, and others. In a way, it's ironic that Mendelsohn relates so intimately with those who believe in the "irretrievability of the past," because for him the stories of the past are vital to understanding the present. What he transmits so magically in Three Rings is his infectious passion for learning and sharing with others.

Perhaps, like Mendelsohn, we love to be carried by these waves of circling narratives because they dare us to hope in this interconnectedness of things.

Mendelsohn's Three Rings not only provides a tale of exile, narrative and fate with respect to Auerbach, but also in terms of himself. Auerbach proves a vehicle for Mendelsohn, like a lost Homeric hero, to aid his journey home: in his work and, certainly, in this book.

[A] unique book... Mendelsohn holds firm to his narrative optimism as this artful book--full of its own digressions, peripheries, and doubts--wends its way to its own moving conclusion.

[E}xquisite... Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the 'Odyssey, ' which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again... Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back to.

[A] slender, dense book... Mendelsohn offers a powerful observation: that our notion of the real might be shaped by the era in which we find ourselves.

Spectacular... The reader feels the flow of a strong narrative, trusts the author's seafaring skills and embarks on a brilliant journey.... Three Rings is a glorious celebration of multiplicity, diversity, journeys, transformations and our commonhumanity.

Daniel Mendelsohn's Three Rings is erudition, essayism, and memoir, made to dance together like a visible clockworks--or literary scholarship such as Ricky Jay might have practiced it onstage. This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise.

An astounding Borgesian document of clarity and brilliance. A book about telling stories that wanders down the seeming two roads of the Hebrew tradition and the classical, which, like Proust's two ways, might turn out to be one way after all. Three Rings has the keeled force of a long poem.

Mendelsohn's talent with descriptive detail brings his work alive, such as repeated descriptions of Auerbach, while exiled in Istanbul, gazing through a palace window over the turquoise Sea of Marmara. Mendelsohn never fails to entertain as he takes the reader across thousands of years' worth of literature and lives.

Contained in the interwoven circles of this slim, labyrinthine book is a vision that encompasses the world. Part dirge, part memoir, part exegesis, all rhapsody -- Mendelsohn's anatomy of literature's subtlest pleasures is itself that subtlest of literary pleasures: a masterpiece.

Memoirist and critic (and TC contributor) Daniel Mendelsohn takes an erudite approach to the writer's dilemma in this new book, which examines the lives and work of three of history's greatest authors as well as Mendelsohn's own experience with a life of letters.