Italo Calvino
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"In Italo Calvino's cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth's first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world."--from publisher's description.
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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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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 Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has...
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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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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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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...
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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...
8) 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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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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These seemingly disparate characters gradually realize their connections to each other just as they realize that something is not quite right about their world. And it seems as though the answers might lie with Hawthorne Abendsen, a mysterious and reclusive author whose bestselling novel describes a world in which the US won the War... The Man in the High Castle is Dick at his best, giving readers a harrowing vision of the world that almost was.
11) 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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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...
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A landmark new translation of a Calvino classic, a whimsical, spirited novel that imagines a life lived entirely on its own terms
Cosimo di Rondó, 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...
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From the acclaimed, genre-bending Italian fabulist author, a posthumous collection of career-spanning stories previously unavailable in English.
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Dark span the career of one of fiction's modern masters: from Italo Calvino's earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II-era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work. Here are speculative stories...
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"One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Pankaj Mishra" "Selected for the SFG Gift Guide 2013" Michael Wood is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. His most recent books are Yeats and Violence and A Very Short Introduction to Film. Martin McLaughlin is the Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the translator of Calvino's Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings,...
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The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino's important early short story collections
Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection-one of Calvino's earliest-take place in a World War II—era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller's later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop, two children...
17) Fantastic Tales
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"The true theme of the nineteenth-century fantastic tale is the reality of what we see: to believe or not to believe in phantasmagoric apparitions, to glimpse another world, enchanted or infernal, behind everyday appearances." - from Calvino's introduction to Fantastic Tales Vampires, ghosts, and other horrors abound in this collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature, selected and edited by Italo Calvino, a twentieth-century master of the...
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This collection of three long stories by the author of Cosmicomics "demonstrates clearly his talent for transforming the mundane into the marvelous" (The New York Times).
Italo Calvino is widely recognized as one of postwar Italy's greatest fiction writers and one of the twentieth century's greatest fabulists. This collection of three stories showcases his range and virtuosity.
In the title story, an Italian Communist poll watcher is stationed at...
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.
20) Hermit in Paris
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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 seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II. He traces the course of his literary career and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and...