Download or read book Six Memos for the Next Millennium written by Italo Calvino and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-04-04 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.
Download or read book Six Memos for the Next Millennium written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The celebrated author of Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities shares his “brilliant, original approach to literature” in these late-career lectures (San Francisco Chronicle). At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures to be delivered the following year at Harvard University. The six planned lectures would define the qualities he most valued in writing, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Six Memos for the Next Millennium collects 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, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern. Written in the mid-1980s, these lectures have proven to be astonishingly prescient as we have entered Calvino’s “next millennium”. “One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature.”—Boston Globe “A key to Calvino’s own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world’s greatest writing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Italo Calvino written by Franco Ricci and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2013-10-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the range of his writing, teaching Calvino can seem a daunting task. This volume aims to help instructors develop creative and engaging classroom strategies. Part 1, "Materials," presents an overview of Calvino's writings, nearly all of which are available in English translation, as well as critical works and online resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," focus on general themes and cultural contexts, address theoretical issues, and provide practical classroom applications. Contributors describe strategies for teaching Calvino that are as varied as his writings, whether having students study narrative theory through If on a winter's night a traveler, explore literary genre with Cosmicomics, improve their writing using Six Memos for the Next Millennium, or read Mr. Palomar in a general education humanities course.
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 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 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 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.
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 Memos written by Maria Luisa Frisa and published by Marsilio Editori. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reflection on the tools and creative possibilities of fashion curating Taking its inspiration from two precedents--Italo Calvino's famous meditation on aesthetic properties Six Memos for the Next Millennium, and the legendary typewritten notes of Vogue editor Diana Vreeland--Memos offers a reflection on fashion curating and its uses of its various products--not only clothes, but also images (photography, magazines, ephemera) and words. Featured here, alongside supplementary materials, are clothes designed by Giorgio Armani, J.W. Anderson for Loewe, Arthur Arbesser, Demna Gvasalia for Balenciaga, Boboutic, Riccardo Tisci for Burberry, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, Gabriele Colangelo, Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior, Marco de Vincenzo, Fendi, Maria Sole Ferragamo, Paul Andrew for Ferragamo, Alessandro Michele for Gucci, Maison Martin Margiela, Francesco Risso for Marni, Noir for Moncler Genius, Moschino, MSGM, Fausto Puglisi, Prada, Pier Paolo Piccioli for Valentino, Giambattista Valli, Random Identities and Versace.
Download or read book Difficult Loves written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1984 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a collection of stories written during the 1940s and 1950s, the author captures moments of revelation in the lives of ordinary people, instants blending recognition and alarm as deceptions and illusions are laid bare.
Download or read book Last Comes the Raven written by Italo Calvino and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2021 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic.” — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities. A trio of gluttonous burglars invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits—and his life—when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim. Select stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino's legacy.
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 The Written World and the Unwritten World written by Italo Calvino and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2023-01-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Wonderful… Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new.” —Publishers Weekly 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 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 discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work—now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein—is a major statement in literary criticism.
Download or read book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods written by Umberto Eco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader—his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.
Download or read book Artful written by Ali Smith and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2024-04-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives In February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate. Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.
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”
