In a conversation that occurred just a year after "The Name of the Rose" was published in English—and in the midst of its international bestsellerdom—Susan Sontag and Umberto Eco discuss Eco's turn to fiction and other topics. They begin with their mutual interest in Roland Barthes and his works and move on to such subjects as interpretation, post-modernism, popular culture, Parsifal, Sherlock Holmes, the power of badly written novels, and much else, as one might expect from a discussion between two famed intellectual polymaths.

Conversations with Distinguished Authors: Umberto Eco and Susan Sontag, 10/24/1984

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