Italo Calvino

Calvino shows that the novel, far from being a dead form, is capable of endless mutations. If on a winter's night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author. Based on an analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, this book is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book are constantly...

"In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. The two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, fight a bloody duel,...

In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and '60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life. Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his...

"One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature."-Boston Globe "A brilliant, original approach to literature, a key to Calvino's own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world's greatest writing."-San Francisco Chronicle At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which...

From the Italian author, personal essays featuring his relationship with his father, his love of movies, and fighting fascism during World War II. "In each other's presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni. To my father's mind, words must serve as confirmations of things, and as signs of possession; to mine, they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed." -from The Road...

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. This is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here--spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism -- are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written,...

Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition. A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves...

"The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino's important early short story collections"--

Distraught and speechless from their journey through the forest to the castle, strangers communicate their experiences by playing a game of tarot.