“Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and
'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.' Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering s
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,
A twentieth-century master of the fantastic pays homage to his nineteenth-century predecessors with this posthumously published anthology of enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and deliciously entertaini
Italo Calvino, Italy's most important postwar novelist, was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco,
Mr Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or a flight of
A collection of fables. It is populated with waifs and strays, a gluttonous thief and a mischievous gardener. It features a comic story "The Argentine Ant".
A collection of stories that follows the adventures of a cast of characters. It includes "Smog" and "A Plunge into Real Estate", as well as other eleven tales.
A triptych of novels in one volume. Viscount Medardo is bisected by a cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, aged 12, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; and Charlemagne's knigh
From the internationally-acclaimed author of some of this century's most breathtakingly original novels comes this posthumous collection of thirty-six literary essays that will make any fortunate read
Italo Calvino's masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book's central character. Based on a witty
A major testament by an essential 20th century writer composed of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work--now available in paperback. With visionary passion, the author tra
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 com
Three senses-taste, hearing, and smell-dominate the lives of the characters in these witty, fantastical stories. But the senses, promising the fulfillment of desire and an exit from the self, only lea
Italo Calvino, one of the world's best storytellers, died on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. Reticent by nature, he was alwa
Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman’s brea
Tales of love and loneliness in which the author blends reality and illusion. “The quirkiness and grace of the writing, the originality of the imagination at work,...and a certain lovable nuttiness ma
Marcovaldo is an unskilled worker in a drab industrial city in northern Italy. He is an irrepressible dreamer and an inveterate schemer. Much to the puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. ? If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each
A series of short, fantastic narratives inspired by fifteenth-century tarot cards and their archetypical images. Full-color and black-and-white reproductions of tarot cards. Translated by William Wea