Italo Calvino
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Series
Language
English
Description
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 problems, and even manages to have love affairs. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the Age of Enlightenment pass by...
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Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 1985-86
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English
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"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 he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness,...
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English
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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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English
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This collection of essays by the acclaimed author of Cosmicomics offers a fascinating, personal journey through some of literature’s greatest works.
Classics, according to Italo Calvino, are not only works of enduring cultural value, but also personal touchstones. They are the books we are always rereading in order to understand our world and ourselves. Here, Calvino introduces more than thirty works from his...
Classics, according to Italo Calvino, are not only works of enduring cultural value, but also personal touchstones. They are the books we are always rereading in order to understand our world and ourselves. Here, Calvino introduces more than thirty works from his...
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English
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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,...
“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,...
6) Mr. Palomar
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English
Description
A novel of a delightful eccentric on a search for truth, by the renowned author of Invisible Cities.
In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous....
In The New York Times Book Review, the poet Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Palomar as a series of “beautiful, nimble, solitary feats of imagination.” Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous....
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English
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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."--Publisher's description.
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Everyman's library volume 138
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English
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Description
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.
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English
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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...
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...
10) Difficult loves
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English
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Description
The author of Invisible Cities explores love and war “with enormous realist dignity” in this collection of “wondrous work from [his] early career” (Kirkus, starred review).
In this short story collection, one of Italy’s greatest storytellers explores the interior lives of characters just as their most cherished illusions of love are suddenly swept away. A soldier is...
In this short story collection, one of Italy’s greatest storytellers explores the interior lives of characters just as their most cherished illusions of love are suddenly swept away. A soldier is...
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English
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Description
An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating...
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English
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Description
This “brilliant collection of essays” and travelogues by the celebrated author of Invisible Cities “may change the way you see the world around you” (The Guardian, UK).
Italo Calvino’s boundless curiosity and ingenious imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, his last collection of new works published during his lifetime. Delving into the...
Italo Calvino’s boundless curiosity and ingenious imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, his last collection of new works published during his lifetime. Delving into the...
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English
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A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.
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English
Appears on list
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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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English
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Description
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...
16) Into the war
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English
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Description
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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English
Description
From the acclaimed, genre-bending Italian fabulist author, a posthumous collection of career-spanning stories previously unavailable in English.
“Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody . . . Distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story.” —from Numbers in the Dark
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers...
“Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody . . . Distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story.” —from Numbers in the Dark
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers...
18) Hermit in Paris
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Language
English
Description
This collection of journals, interviews and travelogues by the author of Invisible Cities has "something fascinating on every page" (The Guardian, UK).
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...
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...
19) Fantastic Tales
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English
Description
The acclaimed author presents “a rich and wide-ranging anthology” of 19th century fantasy and horror stories—with an original introduction for each (Library Journal).
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 speculative. As Calvino explains in his introduction...
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 speculative. As Calvino explains in his introduction...
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English
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Description
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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