Download or read book The Mind of Italo Calvino written by Dani Cavallaro and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was internationally regarded as one of Italy's greatest twentieth century writers. His approach to literature was remarkably adventurous, and he produced a thought-provoking oeuvre. It invited readers to engage themselves with radical thoughts and philosophies, an approach lamentably scarce in contemporary global culture. This book examines Calvino's works of fiction in the context of the philosophical ideas he advanced in his theoretical and critical works. His was an extraordinarily versatile mind, keen on experimenting with a dazzling variety of both fiction and nonfiction forms.
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 If On A Winter s Night A Traveler written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel capable of endless possibilities in an intricately crafted, spellbinding story about writing and reading. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a feat of striking ingenuity and intelligence, exploring how our reading choices can shape and transform our lives. Originally published in 1979, Italo Calvino's singular novel crafted a postmodern narrative like never seen before—offering not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together, the stories form a labyrinth of literature known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers pursue the story lines that intrigue them and try to read each other. Deeply profound and surprisingly romantic, this classic is a beautiful meditation on the transformative power of reading and the ways we make meaning in our lives. "Calvino is a wizard...There is no halting [this book's] metamorphoses." —New York Times Review of Books
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 Collection of Sand written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2013 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published for the first time in English, a final collection of essays by the renowned fabulist writer tours the visual world through explorations of subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens.
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 Deathbird Stories written by Harlan Ellison and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Masterpieces of myth and terror about modern gods from technology to drugs to materialism—“fantasy at its most bizarre and unsettling” (The New York Times). As Earth approaches Armageddon, a man embarks on a quest to confront God in the Hugo Award–winning novelette, “The Deathbird.” In New York City, a brutal act of violence summons a malevolent spirit and a growing congregation of desensitized worshippers in “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” an Edgar Award winner influenced by the real-life murder of Queens resident Kitty Genovese in 1964. In “Paingod,” the deity tasked with inflicting pain and suffering on every living being in the universe questions the purpose of its cruel existence. Deathbird Stories collects these and sixteen more provocative tales exploring the futility of faith in a faithless world. A legendary author of speculative fiction whose best-known works include A Boy and His Dog and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream—and whose major awards and nominations number in the dozens, Harlan Ellison strips away convention and hypocrisy and lays bare the human condition in modern society as ancient gods fade and new deities rise to appease the masses—gods of technology, drugs, gambling, materialism—that are as insubstantial as the beliefs of those who venerate them. In addition to his Nebula, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Edgar, and other awards, Ellison was called “one of the great living American short story writers” by the Washington Post—and this collection makes it clear why he has earned such an extraordinary assortment of accolades. Stories include: “Introduction: Oblations at Alien Altars” “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” “Along the Scenic Route” “On the Downhill Side” “O Ye of Little Faith” “Neon” “Basilisk” “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” “Corpse” “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” “The Face of Helene Bournouw” “Bleeding Stones” “At the Mouse Circus” “The Place with No Name” “Paingod” “Ernest and the Machine God” “Rock God” “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W” “The Deathbird”
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 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 Italo Calvino written by Italo Calvino and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-04 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino’s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin. The letters are filled with insights about Calvino’s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino’s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance. This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.
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 Fantastic Tales written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
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 Difficult Loves written by Italo Calvino and published by Random House. This book was released on 1999 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino s unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the eleven tales from his Difficult Loves collection this
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 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
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 64 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 The Road to San Giovanni written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heartfelt, affecting, and wise, the essay collection The Road to San Giovanni offers Italo Calvino's reflections on his own life and work in five elegant memory exercises.
