Includes five autobiographical meditations that delves into the author's past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Res
With encyclopedic knowledge, this title writes about such diverse subjects as the imaginative pleasures of maps, bizarre exhibitions and the earliest forms of written language. It provides a glimpse i
'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
A collection of nineteenth-century fantastic literature - from enchantments and horrors to subtler, psychological terrors. It includes Hoffmann's "The Sandman", Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and Dickens
Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particu
There was no Italian equivalent to the Brothers Grimm until Italo Calvino collected these folktales from his homeland which transport the reader into a world of adventurers, tricksters, kings, peasant
A collection of stories. Set in Italy in the summer of 1940, it explores the relationships between the different generations caught up in the war as well as the author's own experiences as a teenager.
A couple on a journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to lis
A collection of short stories covering the length of the author's writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. It includes fables; a town where everything has been forbidde
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. This volume of posth
Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of lightness, quickne
