Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous…The literary examples Eco employs range from Dante to Dumas, from Sterne to Spillane. His text is thought-provoking, often outright funny, and full of surprising juxtapositions. * The Atlantic *Reading [these chapters] is indeed like wandering in the woods…They might in fact be called, more prosaically, ‘How to Be a Good Reader,’ for Eco, in his incredibly manipulative way, has you eating out of his hand by the end of them. – Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times Book Review *The dim boundary between the imaginary and the real is Eco’s home terrain…He is a foxy gamesman, using enchanted woods as a flexible image for narrative texts, and mustering a playful array of allusions from The Three Musketeers to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. – Robert Taylor * Boston Globe *[This] dashing and stylish series of six lectures…displays Umberto Eco’s enviable ability to transform arid semiotics and narrative theory into intellectual entertainment. – John O’Reilly * Independent *Eco’s wood is a vaster, foggier place than the simple Eden that sheltered the meaningful, manageable texts and ideas that were traditional canon until very recent times…[He] is among the wisest of the modern literary wise guys. – John Cruickshank * The Globe and Mail *Eco does ingenious work…with the temporal intricacies of [Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie], starting with the tense of the verbs in its first sentence and opening out into elaborate formalist analyses of flashback. – Bernard Williams * New York Review of Books *

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an acclaimed writer, philosopher, medievalist, and semiotician. In addition to dozens of nonfiction books, he authored seven novels, including The Name of the Rose, which has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide.

Louis Menand is a historian, essayist, and the author of several books, including The Metaphysical Club, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history, and The Free World, which was named one of the best books of 2021 by the New York Times. A staff writer at the New Yorker, he is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University.