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 travele[...]

Mr. Palomar is a delightful eccentric whose chief activity is looking at things. He is seeking knowledge; 'it is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath'. Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, a woman sunbathing topless or[...]

From fabulous enchantments and supernatural horrors to subtler, more psychological terrors, the best of nineteenth-century fantastic literature is collected here by Italo Calvino. These mysterious and macabre tales include Hoffmann's nightmarish "The Sandman", Poe's terrifying "The Tell-Tale Heart" [...]

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 stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history [...]

A collection of stories 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 phenomena but, at every turn, the city is there to thwart his inclinations.[...]

Reissue. A triptych of novels in one volume. Viscount Medardo is bisected by a cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, aged 12, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; and Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour.[...]

A postmodern novel which combines a love and a detective story with a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in an allegory of reading. Two readers attempt to finish the same book, but are comically and repeatedly frustrated.[...]

This title enchants stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrog[...]

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language and sensations associated [...]

Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'. Among those his sister sle[...]

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. But this volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we will ever come to the autobiography of thi[...]

'The inspector ordered that the bird be searched. One of the agents stalled saying it made him feel sick, and after some fierce pecking another withdrew sucking a bleeding finger'. In these two stories from an inventive, comic master of the form, old friends and friendly rivals Pietro and Tommasso d[...]

A young, eighteenth-century Italian nobleman defies parental authority by adopting an exclusively arboreal life, watching from his perch in the trees the passing of the Enlightenment and participating in its various delights and duties[...]