Italo Calvino

“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.” — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo —...

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 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense...

Chosen as one of the New York Times's 10 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. Translated by George Martin. A Helen...

A landmark new translation of a Calvino classic, a whimsical, spirited novel that imagines a life lived entirely on its own terms. Cosimo di Rondo, a young Italian nobleman of the 18th century, rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life...

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to...

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...

In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures. In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bissected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate...

Il narratore ripercorre la lunga vicenda del fratello, Cosimo di Rondò, vissuto nella seconda metà del XVIII secolo a Ombrosa, in Liguria...

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 the story of the origins of the universe. Poignant, fantastical...

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....

A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature. An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence...

"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...

Italo Calvino was only 23 when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the...

"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...

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...

Personaggio buffo e melanconico, Marcovaldo è il protagonista d'una serie di favole moderne, dove Italo Calvino va segnando avvenimenti...

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 his neighbors, he chases his dreams - but the results are never the expected ones. Translated...

A volume of 37 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...

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...

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...