When I was in my early teens up to in my junior year in high school, my family used to often take weekend-holidays in Montreal in the summer. This new edition of Mythologies, complete and beautifully rendered by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, critic, and translator Richard Howard, is a consecration of Barthes's classic-a lesson in clairvoyance that is more relevant now than ever.

What Barthes discerned in mass media, the fashion of plastic, and the politics of postcolonial France applies with equal force to today's social networks, the iPhone, and the images of 9/11. As Barthes sees it, these myths must be carefully deciphered, and debunked. They express myths of success, well-being, and happiness. They are the fabrications of consumer society. Yet all around us, in pop culture, politics, mainstream media, and advertising, there are codes and symbols that govern our choices. We decide to like or not, to believe or not, to buy or not. We have access to boundless information and prodigious quantities of stuff.

We own devices that bring the world to the command of our fingertips. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book-one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way readers and philosophers view the world around them. 'No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis,' Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies.

Barthes mythologies 1957