Download or read book Cosmicomics written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1968 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Complete Cosmicomics written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Distance of the Moon written by Italo Calvino and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Download or read book Mr Palomar written by Italo Calvino and published by HMH. This book was released on 1986-09-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).

Download or read book Why Read the Classics written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.

Download or read book The Watcher Other Stories written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1971 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian writer is concerned with grotesque or farcical events of the future.

Download or read book Fantastic Tales written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six fantasy tales from the 19th century, tracing the genre from its roots in German romanticism to the ghost stories of Henry James. The editor, who prefaces each story, analyzes the resurgence of the fantastic in our day.

Download or read book Under the Jaguar Sun written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1988 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Italy's greatest and most popular writers offers three witty, fantastical stories, each dominated by one of three senses--taste, hearing, or smell.

Download or read book Hermit in Paris written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A posthumously published collection of Italo Calvino's autobiographical writings recounting his experiences in Italy's antifascist resistance, paying homage to his influences, tracing the evolution of his literary style, and commenting wryly on his travels in the United States.

Download or read book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Complete Cosmicomics written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive edition of the cosmicomics, Italo Calvino's short stories exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe. The Complete Cosmicomics brings together all of these enchanting stories -- including some never before translated -- in one volume for the first time.

Download or read book Into the War written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction. It offers both a glimpse of this writer's extraordinary life and a distilled dram of his wry, ingenious literary voice."--from cover, page [4].

Download or read book Zoo or Letters Not about Love written by Viktor Shklovsky and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

Download or read book Calvino s Combinational Creativity written by Elizabeth Scheiber and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Calvino’s Combinational Creativity examines the various ways combinatory processes influence the work of the Italian author Italo Calvino. Comprising chapters by six literary scholars, the volume asserts that the Ligurian writer’s creativity often stems from his contemplation of literature even as it investigates the intersection of his work with poets, writers, and literary movements. Each chapter explores a different aspect of Calvino’s creativity. Natalie Berkman examines Calvino as a reader of Ariosto and provides an analysis of mathematical combinations inspired by Vladmir Propp in Il castello dei destini incrociati. Discussing the poetic and scientific influence of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar on Calvino, Sara Ceroni then presents Palomar as a modernist work of epiphanies. This is followed by two chapters investigating different influences on Cosmicomics: Elio Baldi demonstrates how Calvino’s collection of stories appropriates various conventions of the science fiction genre, while Elizabeth Scheiber provides a close reading of two tales to show how Calvino uses science as a metaphor to comment on the poetics of Italian authors Gadda, D’Annunzio, Ungaretti, and Montale. Cecilia Benaglia then proposes Calvino as a reader of Gadda, who served not only as an aesthetic influence, but also as an epistemological one. Finally, juxtaposing Calvino with his contemporary, Umberto Eco, Sebastiano Bazzichetto examines the two authors’ use of figures of speech as ways of constructing labyrinths. Calvino’s Combinational Creativity takes Calvino studies in new directions as it rethinks how the author’s work can be classified, and delves into the sources of his inspiration.

Download or read book Our Ancestors written by Italo Calvino and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-12-23 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Download or read book The Castle of Crossed Destinies written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1979 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness."--Goodreads

Download or read book Looking Up written by Jacob Kramer and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking Up is a celebration of telescopes - their shapes, sizes, and the science they enable. Open your eyes to the wonder of the skies. All over the world, people have built fantastic structures for looking up into the sky. These telescopes are not just scientific instruments -- they are monuments to curiosity and collaboration. In this book readers are introduced to the amazing spectrum of light, and the diverse shapes and methods used to study it.--