Italo Calvino

A collection of folktales to transport the reader into a world of adventurers, tricksters, kings, peasants, and saints. Meticulously selected and artfully recreated, the selection of stories in Italian Folktales is vast and ranges geographically from Corsica and Sicily to Venice and the Alps. Calvino is himself clearly captivated by the folkloric imagination and communicates this in what is a...

VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS - Bound to be beautiful A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas, there is a printer's error in your copy. You...

A captivating, realist collection of Calvino's early stories. These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy...

First paperback publication of Italo Calvino's phenomenally funny account of the universe as a cosmic joke. The Complete Cosmicomics enchants with stories about the evolution of the universe, presenting characters fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. These characters disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms, and...

'A subtle and beautiful meditation' — Sunday Times In Invisible Cities, Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city — Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote, "Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in...

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of stories, both melancholy and funny, about an Italian peasant's struggle to reconcile country habits with urban life. Oblivious to the garish attractions of the town, Marcovaldo is the attentive recorder of natural phenomenon. The reader's heart bleeds for Marcovaldo in his tenacious pursuit of lost domains, but the stories are full of mirth and...

A gorgeous new edition of a playful, romantic fable by one of the twentieth century's master storytellers. 'I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends' Salman Rushdie From the age of twelve, the Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo makes his home among ash, elm, magnolia, plum and almond,...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics—irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino presents twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe. This collection, penned by the giant of Italian literature, features characters—whether human, dinosaur, or mollusc—who disport themselves among galaxies, experience the...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun - into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest... The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll;...

Calvino's fascinating and cerebral collection of essays celebrating all aspects of the visual, translated for the first time and new to Penguin Modern Classics. Italo Calvino claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual universe, in which the things we see tell a truth about the world. With encyclopedic knowledge...

A new translation of Calvino's influential last work 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 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...

Under the Jaguar Sun, available for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, takes readers on a mesmerising journey through three distinct tales that explore the senses and their profound connections to human experience. In the first story, a couple embarks on an epicurean journey across Mexico, tantalised by the idea of a particular ingredient that evokes ancient rituals of...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible. Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories.

New to Penguin Modern Classics Numbers in the Dark is a collection of short stories covering the length of Italo Calvino's extraordinary writing career, from when he was a teenager to shortly before his death. They include witty allegories and wise fables; a town where everything has been forbidden apart from the game of tip-cat; a pitiable tribe watching the...

Breathtakingly inventive – David Mitchell A masterwork by the incomparable, genre-defying, wondrous Italo Calvino. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be...

A triptych of allegorical fables told in Calvino's ingenious genre-defying style. 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...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one - classics are those books that people always say they are 'rereading', not 'reading'), this is an absorbing...

An ingenious exploration of the meaning of literature, from one of Italy's most beloved writers. 'If the world is increasingly senseless, all we can do is try to give it a style.' The difference between life and literature; the good intentions of holiday reading; the avant-garde; the fate of the novel; the fantastical; the art of translation - these are...

"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...

Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted philosophical 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...

Illustrated 50th Anniversary Edition - With an introduction by #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anthony Doerr. A beautiful new illustrated hardcover in the Mariner Classics line: Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels—a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory. With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed... In...

Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER like no other, with Italo Calvino, the master of post-war experimental fiction, and his mind-bendingly brilliant novella about a travelling band of Tarot readers. A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece. A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern....

When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished Taken from his Collection of Sand, these marvelous essays are not great ideas in themselves but commentaries on great ideas and the physical remains they have left behind them- astonishing objects and human-made places which have encapsulated different senses of wonder and desire. The essays range from fire-temples to...

An acclaimed collection of enchanting, comic and clever tales from the Italian master. This collection of playful, deadly fables is populated with waifs and strays, a gluttonous thief and a mischievous gardener. The grimly comic story The Argentine Ant moved Gore Vidal to declare, "if this is not a masterpiece of twentieth-century prose writing, I cannot think of anything better"....