Italo Calvino
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Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and...
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and...
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"Cosimo di Rond©đ, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an existence in the forest canopy he hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the Age of Enlightenment pass...
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's ten best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists. Introduction by the Author; illustrations. Translated by George Martin. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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"We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing." -from The Complete Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells...
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"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...
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun." In "A King Listens," a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives...
8) Into the war
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Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War contains three stories drawing on Italo Calvino's memories of the Second World War in Italy.
These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades.
The callow narrator of these tales observes...
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For the first time in paperback--a volume of thirty-seven diabolically inventive stories, fables, and "impossible interviews" from one of the great fantasists of the 20th century, displaying the full breadth of his vision and wit. Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities...
10) Mr. Palomar
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Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous. Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things," he believes, "that you can venture to seek what is underneath." Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let...
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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...
12) Difficult loves
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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...
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"As for my books, I regret not having published each one under a different nom de plume: that way I would feel freer to start again from scratch each time, just as I always try to do anyway." - from Hermit in Paris This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in...
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"Just like every collection, this one is a diary as well: a diary of travels, of course, but also of feelings, states of mind, moods ... The fascination of a collection lies just as much in what it reveals as in what it conceals of the secret urge that led to its creation." - from Collection of SandItalo Calvino's unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his...
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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...
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Classics, according to Italo Calvino, are not only works of enduring cultural value, but also something much more personal: talismans, touchstones, books through which we understand our world and ourselves. In Why Read the Classics?, Calvino shares over thirty of his classics in essays of warmth, humor, and striking insight. He ranges from Homer to Jorge Luis Borges, from the Persian folklorist Nezami to Charles Dickens. Whether tracing the links...
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A collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino's approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature
Reading, writing, translating, the avant-garde and tradition, the fate of the novel: these are just some of the themes of The Written World and the Unwritten World. A collection of essays, forewords, articles, interviews, notes, and other occasional pieces, this work displays Calvino's remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp...
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An empty suit of armor is the hero in this witty novella, a picaresque gem-now available in an independent volume for the first time-that brilliantly parodies medieval knighthood. Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North...
19) T Zero
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A collection of stories about time, space, and the evolution of the universe in which the author blends mathematics with poetic imagination.
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In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.