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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Frenchman’s novel about the blurred line between fiction and reality, The 7th Function of Language, is all the more poignant in the era of Trump, Le Pen and fake news The walls may be covered with ...

Laurent Binet's HHhH is about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most egregious of Hitler's henchmen, architect of the Holocaust, head of the Gestapo, protector of Bohemia and Moravia, ...

François Hollande is an affable but constantly self-controlled "war machine" who was determined to win the French presidency, regularly called Nicolas Sarkozy an injurious bastard in private and ...

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 ...

You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Every once in a while a book comes along with a premise so inspired that is seems strange no one had ...

When it comes to World War II, what can we consider common knowledge these days? Every Canadian high-school student learns the basics—and Hollywood and the History channel do their part to keep it on ...

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, ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. A small, brave band of adventurers have crossed the ocean to a distant continent. These pioneers stumble across ...