Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544231937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
The complete collection of “nimble and often hilarious” short stories exploring the cosmos by the acclaimed author of Invisible Cities (Colin Dwyer, NPR). 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 a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the story of the origins of the universe. Relating complex scientific and mathematical concepts to our everyday world, they are an indelible and delightful literary achievement. Originally published in Italian in three separate volumes—including the Asti d’Appello Prize-winning first volume, Cosmicomics—these thirty-four dazzling stories are collected here in one definitive English-language anthology. “Trying to describe such a diverse and entertaining mix, I have to admit, just as Calvino does so often, that my words fail here, too. There’s no way I—or anyone, really—can muster enough of them to quite capture the magic of these stories . . . Read this book, please.” —Colin Dwyer, NPR
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156226004
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. “Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?” Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241339111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 64
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Book Description
'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 spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146441
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 433
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Book Description
Together for the first time, a new translation of the revered, contemporary Italian author's short stories describing the beginning of the universe and other natural phenomena builds creative tales around well-known scientific facts.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054423104X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 637
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Book 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 to this collection, “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.” This anthology of twenty-six enchanting, uncanny, terrifying, and immortally entertaining short stories includes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp,” and many more, each with a introduction by Calvino. “Impressive and utterly pleasing…Each story [Calvino] picks is absorbing, unique, and continually surprising.”—Los Angeles Times
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
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 sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547542380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book 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. 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 his meditations stray from the present moment to the great beyond. And though he may fail as an objective spectator, he is the best of company. “Each brief chapter reads like an exploded haiku,” wrote Time Out. A play on a world fragmented by our individual perceptions, this inventive and irresistible novel encapsulates the life’s work of an artist of the highest order, “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (The Guardian).
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146379
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544279573
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
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 a hospital in Turin, where nuns guide the hands of invalids to their preferred candidate in a special election. In “Smog,” a city’s cooperative laundry facility reveals a harbinger of social purification. And in “The Argentine Ant,” the citizens of a provincial seaside town struggle against a government-controlled infestation. “Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us.” —John Updike, New Yorker
Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146697
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
"The posthumously published collection Hermit in Paris draws together an array of Italo Calvino's autobiographical writings that provide an illuminating and unexpectedly intimate portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and fascinating writers. In these pages, Calvino recounts his experiences in Italy's antifascist resistance, pays homage to his influences, traces the evolution of his literary style, and, in one of the book's most humorous and entertaining sections, provides a wry commentary on his travels in the United States in 1959 and 1960"--
