A postmodern novel which combines a love and a detective story with a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in an allegory of reading. Two readers attempt to finish the same book, but are comically and repeatedly frustrated.
Calvino's masterpiece opens with a scene that's reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it's taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but the latest Calvino, the book you are holding in your hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous on this most bewitching ...
Calvino's fable tells the life story of young Cosimo, who, disgusted with the state of the world--and with his parents in particular--expresses his rebellion by climbing into the trees, vowing never to come down.
This novel takes the form of a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which the traveler recounts for the emperor fabulous tales of cities he has known--cities that are imaginary, exotic, and haunting in their strangeness. As the two men talk, the boundaries between reality and illusion become less clear, until they ...
Two novellas: the first, a parody of medieval knighthood told by a nun; the second, a fantasy about a nobleman bisected into his good and evil halves. "Bravura pieces... executed with brilliance and brio"(Chicago Tribune). Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. "Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?" ...
This collection of five lectures Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death is his legacy to us; the universal values he pinpoints become watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself. The five most important qualities for a writer, he says in one essay, are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
In this brilliantly imagined and obsessive novel, Calvino's hero, like the telescope he is named after, is dedicated to minutely observing everything around him, no matter how ordinary.
A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
This collection of five lectures Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death is his legacy to us; the universal values he pinpoints become watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself. The five most important qualities for a writer, he says in one essay, are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
Written between 1943 and 1984, these stories and other pieces--37 in all--are antic explorations of the many facets of Calvino and his wide range of interests.
After Calvino's death, a cache of autobiographical writings was found, and this selection illuminates many crucial periods of his life, including his adolescence during and after Mussolini, his Paris years, and his travels around the U.S. in the late 1950s.
In these widely praised essays Calvino discusses literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. He discusses literature in relation to science, philosophy, and politics and analyzes aspects of the works of the great classical writers of the past. The collection ...
A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination. "Calvino does what very few writers can do: he describes imaginary worlds with the most extraordinary precision and beauty" (Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and ...
This autobiographical, essay-like coming-of-age novel was Calvino's debut, written when he was 23. Set in the 1940s during the war, it tells the tale of a young cobbler's apprentice, his sister (a prostitute), and the band of partisans with whom he becomes involved.
A collection of stories about an Italian peasant's struggle to reconcile country habits with urban life. Oblivious to the garish attractions of the town, Marcovaldo is the attentive recorder of natural phenomena but, at every turn, the city is there to thwart his inclinations.
Before the universe began to expand, when all of everything existed in a single point in space, Qfwfq was there. And afterwards - through the millennia, across galaxies and in different, shifting forms - he persisted. He has some stories to tell. This is a collection of enchanting stories, in revised translation, about the evolution of the ...
Five "memory exercises," written between 1962 and 1977, that illuminate Calvino's life: his childhood home, his cinema-crazed adolescence, his experiences in World War II, an interlude in Paris, and a final essay, "From the Opaque", which sets out his beliefs about writing.
This collection of posthumously published essays includes the title essay, in which Calvino makes a strong case for the reading--and re-reading--of classic literature. In the course of his argument, he touches on the works of Dickens, Flaubert, Voltaire, Stendahl, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Raymond Queneau.
This autobiographical, essay-like coming-of-age novel was Calvino's debut, written when he was 23. Set in the 1940s during the war, it tells the tale of a young cobbler's apprentice, his sister (a prostitute), and the band of partisans with whom he becomes involved.
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