With the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco entertains and intrigues once again, this time on subjects ranging from pop culture to philosophy, from the People's Temple to Thomas Aquinas, from Casablanca to Roland Barthes. Acute, ironic, and often very funny, these timeless essays open up fresh worlds of possibility and new frameworks of existence. A classic work.

"Eco combines scholarship with a love of paradox and a quirky, sometimes outrageous, sense of humor." --The Atlantic

"Amusing and often brilliant." --John Updike, The New Yorker