Umberto Eco

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. His delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and night of apocalyptic terror. The body of one monk is found in a cask of pigs' blood, another is floating in a bathhouse, still another is crushed at the foot of a cliff.

"A novel about the murky world of media politics, conspiracy, and murder."-- 1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce's death remain controversial. 1992, Milan. Colonna, a depressed hack writer, is offered a fee he can't resist to ghostwrite a book. His subject: a fledgling newspaper, which happens to be financed by a powerful media magnate. As Colonna gets to know...

It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts-a talent for learning languages and a...

Internationally best-selling author Umberto Eco is a master stylist whose books, including Baudolino, have been savored by millions around the world. Now, with The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, he crafts another ambitious and breathtaking novel. When book dealer Yambo suffers amnesia, his only remaining memories are books, poems, songs, and movies. Steeped in nostalgia and filled with vivid imagery, this work is a magnificent addition to Eco's...

In this prescient essay collection, the acclaimed author of Foucault's Pendulum examines the cultural trends and perils at the dawn of the 21st century. In the last decade of the 20th century, Umberto Eco saw an urgent need to embrace tolerance and multiculturalism in the face of our world's ever-increasing interconnectivity. At a talk delivered during the first Gulf War, he points out the absurdity of armed conflict in a globalized economy where...

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route...

"On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries"--

A collection of essays from Italian novelist Umberto Eco on a wide range of topics.

Collected here are some of Umberto Eco's finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: "In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some 'signs.' These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes." From Disneyland to...