Umberto Eco is not your typical best-selling author. He’s a medieval scholar, a semiotics professor, and he packs his complicated fiction with philosophy, history, even passages in Latin. Yet his 1980 book The Name of the Rose is one of the most widely read modern novels. 

Eco's new novel, The Prague Cemetery, is a thriller about "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the turn-of-the-20th-century forgery that claimed Jews were secretly plotting world domination (among other atrocities). The provenance of this hideous, influential book is still unknown, and here Eco has invented a key piece of history: an author, a man named Simone Simonini. “I did my best to produce one of the most repugnant characters in the history of literature,” Eco tells Kurt Andersen.

Many of the characters in The Prague Cemetery are based on historical figures, but Eco feels that his purely fictional protagonist is the truest one in the book. “The world is still full of Simoninis,” he says. “It would be enough to analyze political affairs, many stories in our world, to see that producers of historical lies are still there.”