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, The 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, The 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, The Independent