Italo Calvino

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

California

Visionary and Everyday

With this posthumously published anthology--a successor to his bestselling Italian Folktales--Italo Calvino, a contemporary surveyor of the otherwordly, pays homage to twenty-six of his nineteenth-century precursors. The resulting volume is both an education in the history of fantastic literature and a rollercoaster ride of wonder and terror, vampires, ghosts, and the rebellious creatures of our own psyches. Selections include: E.T.A. Hoffmann--"The Sandman" Gérard de Nerval--"the Enchanted Hand" Nikolai Gogol--"The Nose" Edgar Allan Poe--"The Tell-Tale Heart" Hans Christian Andersen--"The Shadow" Ambrose Bierce--"Chickamauga" Robert Louis Stevenson--"The Bottle Imp" Henry James--"The Friends of the Friends" H.G. Wells--"The Country of the Blind" Comprising stories of the supernatural and narratives of the everyday uncanny, Fantastic Tales is a gallery of enchantments, deliciously entertaining yet more disturbing than our most persistent nightmares.

Fantastic Tales

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Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

West Virginia

In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future

Invisible Cities

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New York

Or the Seasons in the City

Marcovaldo, and irrepressible dreamer and inveterate schemer embarks on a series of adventures, with unpredictable results

Marcovaldo

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In this fantastically macabre tale, the separate halves of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball go on to pursue their own independent adventures In a battle against the Turks, Viscount Medardo of Terralba is bisected lengthwise by a cannonball. One half of him returns to his feudal estate and takes up a lavishly evil life. Soon the other, virtuous half appears. When the two halves become rivals for the love of the same woman, there's no telling the lengths each will go to win.Now available in an independent volume for the first time, this deliciously bizarre novella is Calvino at his most devious and winning.

The Cloven Viscount

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Italy's most brilliant modern writer shows that the novel is capable of endless mutations If on a winter's night a traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another. They are the true heroes of the novel, for what would writing be without readers?

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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Texas

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Massachusetts

Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

Cosmicomics

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And Other Stories

“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.

Last Comes the Raven

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New Jersey

Autobiographical Writings

From one of modern literature’s most captivating and elusive masters comes a posthumous volume of thoughtful, elegant, and quick-witted autobiographical writings, all previously unpublished in English. Here is Italo Calvino paying homage to his literary influences and tracing the evolution of his signature style. Here are his reminiscences of Italy’s antifascist resistance and the frenzy of politics and ideas of the postwar era.

The longest and most delightfully revealing section of the book is Calvino’s diary of his travels in the United States in 1959 and 1960, which show him marveling at color TV, wrinkling his nose at the Beats, and reeling at the outpouring of racial hatred attending a civil rights demonstration in Alabama. Overflowing with insight and amusement, Hermit in Paris is an invaluable addition to the Calvino legacy.

Hermit in Paris

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Florida

Oklahoma

This is a series of five autobiographical essays by the Italian writer, Italo Calvino. The first, The Road to San Giovanni, revolves around his father and the house and town where he grew up; the second explores his childhood experience of film, notably the figure of Clark Gable; the third, his experience of war as a member of the Italian Resistance, fighting the fascists; the fourth, houses - particularly the role of the kitchen in domestic life; and the fifth, From the Opaque, is a series of philosophical thoughts about the shape of the world.

The Road to San Giovanni

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

La storia di Pin, bambino sbandato, passato, come per caso, dai giochi violenti dell'infanzia alla dura realtà della guerra partigiana.

Il Sentiero Dei Nidi Di Ragno

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A very fine 1997 first printing, Strong paper and binding.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Fantastic Tales (1st Am Ed/1st)

Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affairs. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun.


The Baron in the Trees

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Grotesk skildring af et dydsmønster af en ridder i en tom rustning i Karl I's hær

Il Cavaliere Inesistente

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Washington

Italo Calvino The Written World And The Unwritten World: Essays

Revised edition 

The Path to the Spiders' Nests

Lightly bleached spine, some creases and shelfwear as shown. Pages clean and free from marks. First American edition 1981 by Pantheon

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Italo Calvino

Fantastic Tales

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

Marcovaldo

Italo Calvino

The Cloven Viscount

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

Cosmicomics

Italo Calvino

Last Comes the Raven

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

Hermit in Paris

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

The Road to San Giovanni

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

Il Sentiero Dei Nidi Di Ragno

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

Fantastic Tales (1st Am Ed/1st)

Italo Calvino

The Baron in the Trees

Italo Calvino

Il Cavaliere Inesistente

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino The Written World And The Unwritten World: Essays

Italo Calvino

The Path to the Spiders' Nests

Italo Calvino

Italian Folktales