Bucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history-a man who thought his life was over-lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.

At the intersection of the natural and supernatural, myth and history, dream and science, lies Mircea Eliade's novella. Now in its first paperback edition, the psychological thriller features Dominic Matei, an...

"Five Faces of Modernity" is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: "modernity," "avant-garde," "decadence," "kitsch," and "postmodernism." The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural...