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...

"On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life.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"--

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.