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    The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
    Unavailable
    The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
    Unavailable
    The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
    Ebook224 pages3 hours

    The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

    By Daniel Mendelsohn

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a profound exploration of the mysteries of identity. It is also a meditation in which the author uses his own divided life to investigate the "rich conflictedness of things," the double lives all of us lead.

    Daniel Mendelsohn recalls the deceptively quiet suburb where he grew up, torn between his mathematician father's pursuit of scientific truth and the exquisite lies spun by his Orthodox Jewish grandfather; the streets of manhattan's newest "gay ghetto," where "desire for love" competes with "love of desire;" and the quiet moonlit house where a close friend's small son teaches him the meaning of fatherhood.  And, finally, in a neglected Jewish cemetery, the author uncovers a  family secret that reveals the universal need for storytelling, for inventing myths of the self.  The book that Hilton Als calls "equal to Whitman's 'Song of Myself,'" The Elusive Embrace marks a dazzling literary debut.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 4, 2012
    ISBN9780307809872
    Unavailable
    The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
    Author

    Daniel Mendelsohn

    Daniel Mendelsohn a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, is the author of the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. He teaches at Bard College.

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