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Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.

Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Daniel Mendelsohn weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own – works that pondered the nature of narrative itself: Jewish philologist Erich Auerbach, 17th-century French archbishop Francois Fenelon, and the German novelist W.G. Sebald. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life. He will be joined in conversation by classicist Johanna Hanink.