David Bellos

"The definitive biography of the world's most popular novel. Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general readership. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed...

Funny and surprising on every page, Is That a Fish in Your Ear offers readers new insight into the mystery of how we come to know what someone else means whether we wish to understand Asteerix cartoons or a foreign head of state. Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from...

In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: a bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events -- such as the marriage of a girl and a snake -- confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may...

Chronicles the history of counting and calculating from the time of cave dwellers to the late twentieth century, examining how different cultures used numbers to solve basic problems related to their everyday needs.

A political comedy on two American academics who are recording story-singers in Albania. The two are on a project to show that story-singers were the source of Homer's epics, but this is much too highbrow for the district governor, convinced the pair are spies. By an Albanian writer, author of The Concert.

On Dec. 13, 1981 Mehmet Shehu, a man who was number two in the Albanian government, was killed. Was it murder or suicide? Many different politicians in the country might stand to gain from this death. A wonderful analysis of dictatorship and communistic government.