It begins on a moonlit night. A carriage traverses the cold German countryside. The lights of a nearby (or is it far-off?) city shimmer and shift. A turn is taken and suddenly a traveler finds himself before the city’s walls, and then within them. Uncertain figures move through the mist. The carriage comes to a stop. Our hero alights at an inn. Welcome to the nineteenth century. Enjoy your stay.

Andrés Neman’s Traveler of the Century is a novel in five parts, and at least as many genres. There are elements of a historical novel, an epistolary novel, and a novel of ideas. Its subject is

Caligula has generally gone down in history as a mad megalomaniac: so mad that he gave his favorite horse a palace, lavish purple clothing, a retinue of servants, and even had plans to appoint it to the consulship, the highest political office below the emperor himself. In fact his extravagant treatment of the animal was a pointed joke. Caligula was satirizing the aims and ambitions of the Roman aristocracy: in their pursuit of luxury and empty honors, they appeared no less silly than the horse.

If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada. Rulfo cleared the way for magic realism with Pedro Páramo, published in 1955, a decade before the Boom. Bolaño, a Chilean whose great subject was Mexico, asserted that realism itself was magic enough to support a novel, and his gangs of visceral realists and killers bore him out. Meanwhile Sada, who died last year, reveled in wordplay and mimicry in his Joycean celebrations of Mexico’s cowboy north.

Robert Hughes brings an impressive erudition to bear upon his biography of Rome, tracing the city’s rise from a patchwork foundation of local tribes to the site of La Dolce Vita. Sprawling subjects are Hughes’s specialty: His reputation as a prominent art and cultural critic rests on a series of expansive tomes, from American Visions: Epic History of Art in America to The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding, and Rome itself is subdivided into prodigious chunks on the Augustan age and the later Empire to the Grand Tour and Fascism. From mythical origins to caput mundi, from a

Perhaps the best way to understand what drove Roland Barthes, then a thirty-nine-year-old professor of literature, to begin writing the series of short essays later published as “Mythologies” is to take a brief glance at the myth of the supposedly decadent influence of French theory on American intellectual life.