Inventing the Enemy: Essays

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0547640978 ISBN 13: 9780547640976

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

Inventing the Enemy covers a wide range of topics on which Umberto Eco has written and lectured for the past ten years, from a disquisition on the theme that runs through his most recent novel, The Prague Cemetery—every country needs an enemy, and if it doesn’t have one, must invent it—to a discussion of ideas that have inspired his earlier novels. Along the way, he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. Eco also sheds light on the indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and provides a lively examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, censorship, violence, and WikiLeaks. These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsessions by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists.

Book Description:

HMH Hardcover, 2012Previous ISBN 978-0-547-64097-6

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Umberto Eco

“Puzzling, provocative, humorous, and profound . . . The author is a writer of grace and wit.” –New York Times

“One of the most influential thinkers of our time.” –Los Angeles Times

“Eco combines scholarship with a love of paradox and a quirky, sometimes outrageous, sense of humor.” –Atlantic Monthly

“The star bookworm of our times.” –New York Review of Books