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Highlights Calvino's fascination with folk tales, knights, social & political allegories, & science fiction.
The first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth century This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a ge...
In his Memos for the Next Millennium, the Italian writer Italo Calvino identified five literary qualities that should accompany writers and readers into the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. Though never finished, the Memos continue to inspire readers and scholars. This volume turns three of Calvino’s poetic qualities – lightness, quickness, multiplicity – into powerful hermeneutic strategies for reading ancient and late antique texts, ranging widely from Homer’s Iliad to Claudian’s carmina minora. It is the first book to read ancient literature through the lens of Calvino’s Memos, thus fostering a new discussion of the interactions between modern and ancient texts as well as between methodologies.
A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.
Set in Italy in the summer of 1940, this trio of stories explores the relationships between the different generations caught up in the war as well as Calvino's own experiences as a teenager. In the title story, 'Into the War', we are given an insight into what life was really like for those too young to be conscripted into Mussolini's army, while in 'The Avanguardisti in Menton', Calvino and his friends take a revealingly anti-climactic trip to the garrisoned French town of Menton, the sole Italian conquest of the early months of the conflict. The final story, 'UNPA Nights', is a touching, comic tale of friendship in a blackout, where the narrator's imagination wanders as he roams through the seedier parts of the darkened town instead of guarding the school buildings. Into the War is Calvino at his autobiographical best, combining brilliantly recollected memory with compelling wit and perfect prose.
Fifty-five fictional cities, each described in beautiful detail - each with a woman's name... In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote 'Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.' This is a captivating meditation on culture, language, time, memory and the nature of human experience. 'Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose... The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island' Jeanette Winterson 'Touches inexhaustibly on the essence of the human urge to create cities, be in cities, speak of cities' Guardian 'A subtle and beautiful meditation' Sunday Times
Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. But this volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we will ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers. The pieces collected here range from the early 1950s to his last interview, completed just before his sudden death in 1985. Apart from providing a glimpse into his own formative experiences and evolution as an author, Calvino's autobiographical writings also examine the major events of twentieth-century history from a very personal viewpoint. This volume is full of ideas...
The definitive edition of the cosmicomics, Italo Calvino's short stories exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe. The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of these enchanting stories -- including some never before translated -- in one volume for the first time.
She uncovers the apparent contradiction that while Calvino repeatedly advocated - throughout his career of forty-plus years - a precise language, this call for precision did not extend to erotic subject matter, where Calvino sometimes felt that "direct representation" was virtually impossible. Gabriele finds that in Calvino the challenge of erotic representation is linked to the complexity of the writer's role, especially as articulated in Calvino's famous article, "Cibernetica e fantasmi."
Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of migrant starlings, Mr Palomar's observations render the world afresh. 'Beautifully nimble, solitary feats of imagination' Seamus Heaney 'Beguiling' Time