Laurent Binet’s first novel, “HHhH,” walked a bit of a tightrope. In writing metafiction about the attempted assassination of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, Binet almost guaranteed that he’d take ...

The central figure of "HHhH" is Reinhard Heydrich, a vicious and politically savvy minister in Adolf Hitler's cabinet. The book's title comes from the phrase "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" or ...

In Umberto Eco’s 1983 novel, The Name of the Rose, a ratiocinating monk named Baskerville and his assistant team up in search of a missing text—the apocryphal second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, which ...

“Once again, the writer stains the tree of History with his thoughts, but it is not for us to find the trick that would enable us to put the animal back in its carrying cage,” writes Russian poet Osip ...

The year after I graduated college I had a job in a library. When people underlined passages in the library books, or made notes in the margins, the books were sent to me. I erased the lines and the ...

Laurent Binet tackles the story of a Nazi and the two Czechoslovakian war heroes who set out to assassinate him and writes a marvelous, charming, engaging novel. But he’s not quite sure how he feels ...

Consider, for a moment, the appeal to be found in the Nazi assassination. The glee with which we enjoy the Consider, for a moment, the appeal to be found in the Nazi assassination. The glee with which ...

Walking home on Feb. 25, 1980 after lunching with future French president François Mitterand, Roland Barthes – one of the great French intellectuals of the last century – was struck by a laundry van, ...

THE LIBERATION OF the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II gave the world a new atlas of atrocity. Ever since, place names such as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen have been synonyms for ...

The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, announced today, includes a novel by Javier Ceras about Enric Marco, the Spanish man who spent three decades pretending to have survived two ...

Laurent Binet’s latest book, “Civilizations,” imagines what might have been if the Incas invaded Europe in the 16th century. By Tobias Grey PARIS — There is a scene in Laurent Binet’s latest novel, ...