The Complete Cosmicomics

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544231937
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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

Cosmicomics

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156226004
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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

The Distance of the Moon

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241339111
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 55

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.

Invisible Cities

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054413320X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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.

Difficult Loves

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156260558
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
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.

Mr. Palomar

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547542380
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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).

Into the War

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146387
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
"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].

Fantastic Tales

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544152093
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 609

Book Description
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.

Under the Jaguar Sun

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156927949
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Book Description
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.

Last Comes the Raven

Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146700
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
“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.