This episode is a reading of Daniel Mendelsohn’s essay, “A Little Iliad,” a review of the film Troy, an adaptation of the Iliad, from the Review’s June 24, 2004, issue. It is read by the countertenor and opera director Anthony Roth Costanzo. Among many other roles, Costanzo has performed as Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus and Akhnaten in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, both at the Met Opera, and he won a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording in 2022 for the cast recording of Akhnaten. He is currently the director and president of Opera Philadelphia.
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Daniel Mendelsohn is the Editor-at-Large of The New York Review of Books and the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard. The paperback edition of his translation of Homer’s Odyssey was released in April by the University of Chicago Press.
Last week’s episode was an interview with Mendelsohn on Homer’s Odyssey, both his own translation and Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation. You can read “A Little Iliad” and other essays by Mendelsohn with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963.
Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.
