Alberto Manguel

In the 2007 CBC Massey Lectures, Alberto Manguel leads us back into our literary tradition to find insight about one of the most contentious issues of our time: the rise of ethnic nationalism. The end of ethnic nationalism -- building societies around sets of common values -- seems like a good idea. But something is going wrong. Manguel suggests we should look at what stories have to teach us about society.With wit and erudition, Manguel looks at...

Fourteen years later, Manguel anchors his new book in the primal connection between reading and curiosity. Tracing twenty-five centuries of human history, from the fourth century BC to the present day, Manguel dedicates each of his chapters to a single character-ranging from our best-known thinkers, scientists, and artists to seemingly minor figures of whom we know little more than one inspired utterance-in whom he identifies a particular way of asking...

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000-volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading....

No one knows if there was a man named Homer, but there is little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature. The Iliad and the Odyssey-with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Cyclops, the beautiful Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods-are familiar to most people because they are so pervasive. They have fed our imaginations for over two and a half millennia,...

Internationally acclaimed anthologist Alberto Manguel offers a collection of 18 wonderful summer stories from around the world. Savour a story at a time, or escape for an entire afternoon. Print run 7,500.

One of the world’s great short story writers emerges with a selection of stories from her past, a trove of hidden treasures.
Mavis Gallant moved from Montreal to Paris in 1950 to write short stories for a living. Since then she has continued to write, producing a remarkable body of work. In 1993, Robertson Davies said, “She has written many short stories. My calculation suggests that she has written in this form at least the...