“I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses. ”

I must say that the first few hundred pages of this manuscript really hooked me. Action packed, they have everything today’s reader wants in a good story. Sex (lots of it, including adultery, sodomy, incest), also murder, war, massacres, and so on.

Umberto Eco on the merits of imperfect works of art, including ‘The Count of Monte Cristo,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘Casablanca.’

I recall, though my recollection may be faulty, a magnificent article by Giorgio Manganelli explaining how a sophisticated reader can know whether a book is worth reading even before he opens it. He wasn’t referring to the capacity often required o…

Umberto Eco’s essay “How to Travel with a Salmon” first appeared in our Summer 1994 issue; it was later the title piece in a collection of Eco’s essays. Eco died last Friday at his home in Milan. He was eighty-four. In an interview with The Paris Rev…

According to the newspapers, there are two chief problems that beset the modern world: the invasion of the computer, and the alarming extension of the Third World. The newspapers are right, and I know it.