Umberto Eco

"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...

A 17th Century Italian knight recounts his adventures during a siege in the Thirty Years' War and afterwards in naval espionage against the British. In between, he describes the salons of Paris, lessons in fencing and reasons of state, and gives his thoughts on writing love letters and on blasphemy.

How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody." These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal...

Reflections on how the idea of catalogs has changed over the centuries and how, from one period to another, it has expressed the spirit of the times. Companion to the author's History of beauty and On ugliness.

"Esta colección de charlas -- definidas por el propio Eco como un collage sobre las bases del racismo y de la intolerancia -- evidencia el abismo que dista entre actuar con la cabeza y actuar con las vísceras. Una guía concisa, visionaria y única por su claridad y autoridad, rabiosamente actual en este momento tan delicado en el que la incomprensión y lo retrógrado parecen imponerse. Un manual imprescindible para mirar al otro con nuevos ojos...