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Reading lists

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

On the Shoulders of Giants

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture.

Unlike many academics, he [Eco] had the ability to write in an accessible and engaging style… This book consists of 12 essays… Reading them is exhilarating… Almost every page of this entrancing book invites questions and provokes reflections

On the Shoulders of Giants…captures Eco on some of his most generous and scintillating form as a lecturer, breezing along with a lifetime’s material at his fingertips

There are people you’ve never met and yet you miss them when they are gone… Eco’s famously ironic voice is penetrating … The issues Eco addresses are so enormous in their scale they seem insurmountable, yet his measured, erudite commentary assures you that they can be understood and therefore resolved

He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco’s irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling

Umberto Eco (Author) 
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

The final collection from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture. 
 
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. 
 
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

Chronicles of a Liquid Society

The final book from one of Europe's cultural giants: an entertaining collection of essays about the modern world - from unbridled individualism to mobile phones

Discover the final book from one of Europe's cultural giants. 
 
In this entertaining collection of essays about the modern world the celebrated author of The Name of the Rose explores everything from unbridled individualism to mobile phones. 
 
'He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco's irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling' Guardian 
 
'Eco has left us an intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores' Publisher's Weekly

A swan song from one of Europe's great intellectuals...Eco entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity...there's much here to enjoy and ponder

Eco has left us an intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores.

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays.

Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. A celebrated essayist as well as novelist, in this, his last collection, he explores many aspects of the modern world with irrepressible curiosity and wisdom written in his uniquely ironic voice. 
 
Written by Eco as articles for his regular column in l’Espresso magazine, he brings his dazzling erudition, incisiveness and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, unbridled individualism, conspiracies, the old and the young, mobile phones, mass media, racism, good manners and the crisis in ideological values. It is a final gift to his readers – astute, witty and illuminating.

Numero Zero

The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the internationally bestselling author of The Name of the Rose

Combines farce and conspiracy thriller while retaining the author’s familiar sense of detachment

Cynical but heartfelt, utterly flippant yet deadly serious

A conte philosophique on our tendency to see conspiracies everywhere… in the end, a damning confirmation of the long moral and civic decline of Italy over the past fifty years

Eco’s novel on post-War Italy inevitably turns into a detective story. But it's one without a culprit: like all the great detective stories of [Italy’s] recent history...[which] Eco revisits at high speed in this fast-paced, frequently entertaining novel

A kaleidoscopic, playful, yet deadly serious satire

The gripping new conspiracy thriller by the bestselling author of The Name of the Rose 
 
1945, Lake Como. Mussolini and his mistress are captured and shot by local partisans. The precise circumstances of Il Duce’s death remain shrouded in confusion and controversy. 
 
1992, Milan. Colonna takes a job at a fledgling newspaper financed by a powerful media magnate. There he learns the paranoid theories of Braggadocio, who is convinced that Mussolini’s corpse was a body-double and part of a wider Fascist plot. 
 
Colonna is sceptical. But when a body is found, stabbed to death in a back alley, and the paper is shut down, even he is jolted out of his complacency. 
 
Fuelled by conspiracy theories, Mafiosi, love, corruption and murder, Numero Zero reverberates with the clash of forces that have shaped Italy since the Second World War. This gripping novel from the author of The Name of the Rose is told with all the power of a master storyteller.

Inventing the Enemy

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture.

Whether discussing the relationship between our knowledge and God, abortion, stem cells, embryos, the right to life, or reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, this collection gleams with clarity, depth and wisdom

For the sheer depth and clarity of his learning and wisdom, Eco has no living rival

[A] philosophical football match that encompasses myth, literature and history... Discursive, grandiose, witty stuff from the quintessential savvy professor

Eco's greatest virtue might be said to lie in his ability to clarify the exact nature of our present perplexities...lucid, logical and always firmly on the side of civilisation

Eco's writing has a unique ability to dance on the page and to resonate in the mind

Thought provoking… nuanced, accessible prose… the collection amply shows off Eco’s sophisticated, agile mind and will undoubtedly bring pleasure to readers familiar with his worlds while enriching those willing to learn about them

There is plenty here for everyone, and some of it is up-to-the-minute. The subtitle may be a semi-provocative exaggeration, but this collection of occasional pieces does cover a lot of ground

All of [Eco’s essays] pay tribute to history, giving his work their characteristically accessible weight and depth, often conveying some new nugget of information

[Eco’s] mind is still as fecund as ever, as demonstrated by this collection of essays… Eco may be an intellectual of the highest order, but there’s nothing forbidding about this collection of essays which are readable and thought-provoking

The final collection of essays from the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery, on the subjects of art and culture. 
 
In this collection of essays we find Umberto Eco’s perennial areas of interest explored in a lively and engaging style, accompanied by beautiful reproductions of the art he discusses. In these wide-ranging pieces he explores the roots of our civilization, changing ideas of beauty, our obsession with conspiracies and the emblematic heroes of the great narrative, amongst other fascinating topics. 
 
Umberto Eco was one of the most influential, and entertaining, intellectuals of the last century, as well as being a critically acclaimed and bestselling writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

The Prague Cemetery

Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012 
 
 'Eco's most accessible novel since The Name of the Rose, a temptingly complex tale of 19th-century plots and conspiracies' - Sunday Times

[This] magnificent new novel... marks a return to the heady mixture of absorbing ideas and down-and-dirty historical detail that made The Name of the Rose such an international bestseller in the 1980's

This is a great mystery novel about paranoia, prejudice and forgery... We gain access to a world of city streets, strange anecdotes, gourmet menus, and conspiratorial minds... Eco’s best novel since The Name of the Rose

A smartly entertaining fin-de-siècle romp

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder and gourmadising... The great trick Eco pulls off here is to combine the most chilling of ideas - the origin of a hoax that led to genocide - with, elsewhere in the novel, an often funny lightness of touch... In other hands, this novel could have been grim.  But you end up feeling, despite all the darkness, that Eco is one of literature's great optimists

Imagine Dan Brown adorned with a PhD: that's Umberto Eco

Erudite and pop, sinister and passionate... A work destined to become a classic

The Prague Cemetery, snakes along an underground trail that twists through the enlightened heresies and bigoted gospels respectively propagated by Freemasons and Illuminati, Jesuits and Jew-baiters, before hinting at an ideological conspiracy that underlines the deceits of contemporary politics

Perhaps history's first and biggest conspiracy theory

Aided by a translation (from Richard Dixon) that tucks into Eco’s rich period pastiche with relish, the story weaves a fictional master of mischief into actual events… Highly enjoyable in its cunning twists

Has latterly been dubbed the thinking person's Da Vinci Code. But Eco is at home in history in a way that Dan Brown is not... Eco has a sure grasp not only of historical fact but of a period's literature. He's a dab hand at intertextuality... His intent in exposing the moment that lies at the origin of modern anti-Semitism seems to be to show how fictions can have factual consequences. Contemporary spin-doctors take note. Lies, particularly if they follow the pattern of paranoid conspiracies and create an enemy, can have dire effects... Eco is a comic master and, in his 80th year, his irreverent intelligence, if not always his plotting or scabrous taste, remains bracing

There is a great deal of pleasure to be taken in the games Eco plays and in the serious thinking about history and stories that lies beneath them

An extremely readable narrative of betrayal, terrorism, murder… chilling

Nineteenth-century Europe abounds with conspiracy both ghastly and mysterious. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian priests are strangled with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses by night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. 
 
But what if, behind all of these conspiracies, lies just one man?

A conversation curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

This is Not the End of the Book

A storming book. The next best thing to sitting in Umberto Eco's living room after dinner;  a dream collection of lucid and fascinating discussions

Hurrah for philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco and playwright and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, who have come together to praise the medium... Fans of Eco and Carrière will be charmed

An entertainingly free-range dialogue about writing past, present and future

The dialogue between these two superbrains is freakishly compelling and covers everything from papyrus scrolls to e-readers... Never fails to be enlightening and engaging... Hooray for this brilliant book

This book is a reminder that the satisfaction of working through even a relatively short book comes in part through confronting digressions, dead ends and distractions: the hallmark of conversation between friends, not of Internet speed-reading

As the conversation blossoms, the pair wander blissfully off topic into wider philosophical speculation about the nature of culture, for instance or humanity's curious relationship with past, present and future.  And along the way there are plenty of pleasant diversions and anecdotes, taking in such diverse subject matter as Italian cinema forgotten French baroque poets, and the place of philosophy in contemporary European education systems.  All this, naturally, informed by their love of books

They're great thinkers and talkers, with a lifetime of book-loving behind them, the pair digress into fascinating areas, discussing how new media give rise to their own languages, how we came to have the canon of great literature we do now and the effect that ephemerality, memory, religion and even fakery have had on the world of books

A lively exchange of views… it’s fun to eavesdrop on their conversation

Jean-Claude Carrière is a writer, playwright and screenwriter, who recently collaborated with Michael Haneke on his award-winning film The White Ribbon. He has worked with many of the twentieth century's great directors including Peter Brook, Milos Forman, Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard, and is the author of Please Mr Einstein. 
 
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) wrote fiction, literary criticism and philosophy. His first novel, The Name of the Rose, was a major international bestseller. His other works include Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, Baudolino, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, The Prague Cemetery and Numero Zero along with many brilliant collections of essays. 
 
Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is a writer and editor. His interviews with Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carrière and Stephen Jay Gould were published in the book Conversations About the End of Time. He is also the editor of several collections of essays, not yet translated into English, which include A Universal Dictionary of Bread andAn Encyclopaedia of Knowledge and Belief.

'The book is like the spoon: once invented, it cannot be bettered' - Umberto Eco. 
 
These days it is impossible to get away from discussions of whether the book will survive the digital revolution. Blogs, tweets and newspaper articles on the subject appear daily, many of them repetitive, most of them admitting ignorance of the future. Amidst the twittering, the thoughts of Jean-Claude Carrière and Umberto Eco come as a breath of fresh air. 
 
This thought-provoking book takes the form of a conversation in which Carrière and Eco discuss everything from how to define the first book to what is happening to knowledge now that infinite amounts of information are available at the click of a mouse. 
 
En route there are delightful digressions into personal anecdote. We find out about Eco's first computer and the book Carrière is most sad to have sold. And while, as Carrière says, the one certain thing about the future is that it is unpredictable, it is clear from this conversation that, in some form or other, the book will survive.

Umberto Eco

Alastair McEwen

Richard Dixon

We are here to remember what happened and to declare solemnly that 'they' must never do it again. But who are 'they'? 
 
HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST is a selection of three thought-provoking essays on freedom and fascism, censorship and tolerance - including Eco's iconic essay 'Ur-Fascism', which lists the fourteen essential characteristics of fascism, and draws on his own personal experiences growing up in the shadow of Mussolini. 
 
Umberto Eco remains one of the greatest writers and cultural commentators of the last century. In these pertinent pieces, he warns against prejudice and abuses of power and proves a wise and insightful guide for our times. 
 
If we strive to learn from our collective history and come together in challenging times, we can hope for a peaceful and tolerant future. 
 
Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto: 'Do not forget.' 
 
'He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco's irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling' Guardian

Umberto Eco

Praise for How to Spot a Fascist

He brilliantly exposes all that is absurd and paradoxical in contemporary behaviour. Eco’s irony is disarming, his cleverness dazzling

Books by Umberto Eco

Series by Umberto Eco

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Articles featuring Umberto Eco

The ultimate Eurovision-inspired reading list

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