Umberto Eco

19th-century Europe, from Turin to Prague to Paris, abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. In Italy, republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. In France, during the Paris Commune, people eat mice, plan bombings and rebellions in the streets, and celebrate Black Masses. Every nation has its own secret service and secret organizations that are plotting against each other, perpetrating conspiracies...

"By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis -- from choosing a topic to organizing a work...

A literary prank leads to deadly danger in this “endlessly diverting” intellectual thriller by the author of The Name of the Rose (Time).
 
Bored with their work, three Milanese book editors cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their own creation, they produce a map indicating the geographical point from...

In The Peanuts Papers, thirty-three writers and artists reflect on the deeper truths of Schulzs deceptively simple comic, its impact on their lives and art and on the broader culture. These enchanting, affecting, and often quite personal essays show just how much Peanuts means to its many admirersand the ways it invites us to ponder, in the words of Sarah Boxer, zhow to survive and still be a decent human beingy in an often bewildering world. Featuring...

An intellectually nonconformist friar investigates a series of mysterious deaths in an isolated abbey.