Fifteen years after the release of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award winner, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is now being reissued. The updated book contains new material developed in conjunction with Ken Burns's new 3-part documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, which features Daniel Mendelsohn and the story of his family.
Mendelsohn will be in conversation with Francine Prose, the New York Times bestselling novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. Copies of the new book will be available for purchase at the event and our online store, with a book signing to follow.
The Lost is a modern classic of post-memory literature and a riveting exploration of the Holocaust by a descendent of its victims. Daniel Mendelsohn spent five years in a dozen countries on four continents with his brother Matt (an award-winning photojournalist whose photographs appear throughout the book) searching for an answer to the question he had first asked as a boy: What really happened to his great-uncle Shmiel and his family during the Holocaust? Spoken of only in hushed murmurs or incomprehensible Yiddish phrases, Daniel later discovered a bundle of letters written by Shmiel in 1939 and vowed to solve this family puzzle.
Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning memoirist, critic, essayist, and translator. A longtime contributor to The New Yorker and New York Review of Books, he has also been a columnist on books, film, TV, and culture for BBC Culture, New York, Harpers, and the New York Times Book Review. His books include the memoirs An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), the internationally bestselling Holocaust family saga The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), a translation, with commentary, of the Modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and three collections of essays, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2019). His tenth book, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, published in September 2020, was named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (Best Foreign Book Prize) in France. Mr. Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and the Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust that supports nonfiction writing. He teaches literature at Bard College.
Francine Prose is the author of twenty-one works of fiction, including the highly acclaimed Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.