How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken : essays / Daniel Mendelsohn.

Introduction. How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken -- Part one. Heroines. Novel of the year (The lovely bones) -- Not afraid of Virginia Woolf (The hours) -- Victims on Broadway I (The glass menagerie) -- Victims on Broadway II (A streetcar named desire) -- The women of Pedro AlmodoÌvar (Volver ) -- Lost in Versailles (Marie Antoinette) -- Looking for Lucia (Lucia at the Met) -- Not an ideal husband (Ted Hughes's Alcestis) -- Part two. Heroics. A little Iliad (Troy) -- Alexander, the movie!) -- Duty (300) -- It's only a movie (Kill Bill, vol. 1) -- Nailed! Dale Peck's hatchet jobs) -- The way out (Everyman) -- Mighty Hermaphrodite (Middlesex) -- Part three. Closets. The Passion of Henry James (The Master) -- The Two Oscar Wildes (The Importance of Being earnest) -- The tale of two housmans (The Invention of love) -- The Truman Show (The stories and letters of Truman Capote) -- Winged messages (Angels in America) -- An affair to remember (Brokeback Mountain) -- The man behind the curtain (John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe) -- Part four. Theater. The Greek way (Greek tragedies in New York) -- Bitter-Sweet (Private lives) -- Double Take (The producers) -- Harold Pinter's celebration (Pinter retrospective at Lincoln Center) -- Part five. War. Theaters of war (Thucydides' history) -- The Bad boy of Athens (Medea on Broadway) -- For the birds (Nathan Lane's Frogs) -- September 11 at the movies (World Trade Center and United 93).

A collection of essays that mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books in which the classicist/critic looks at contemporary culture through its movies, books and theater.