One feverish night, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed of a terrifying “hue of brown”. It was the latest visitation from the Night Hag, his term for the horrors that had haunted him from early childhood, ...

It hasn’t worked out well for the curious. Pandora wondered what was in the jar and unleashed all the woes of humanity; Eve wondered what the fruit tasted like and caused the fall of man; the cat just ...

Alberto Manguel is a liar. Or so the reader of this book is invited to think, having enjoyed a peculiarly evasive and suspenseful story told by a rather neurotic and unreliable character named ...

One of the most delightful books I read this past year was “The Library at Night,” a series of essays on the “idea” of the library through time and place, from ancient Alexandria to the Web, with ...

Alberto Manguel, who through his wise and compassionate love of books became a mainstay of Canada's literary conversation, suddenly vanished from the country two years ago. He sold his Toronto house ...