Backstage: Reading in a World of Images: LIVE Shorts

"Reading in a World of Images," DANIEL MENDELSOHN & JAMES WOOD in conversation with PICO IYER, LIVE from the NYPL Lite, September 17, 2008. "Does the common reader exist in our world of splitting screens? Where might we find beauty, seriousness or moral passion among our fraying books? And does it even make sense to put Flaubert, Homer, and Oliver Stone into the same sentence? Two of the defining public critics of our time—James Wood, a passionate reader who creates cathedrals out of words, and Daniel Mendelsohn, a professional classicist bringing rigor to the popular arts—investigate the space where reading ends and real criticism begins." -- Pico Iyer